A Comparative Study Of American And Chinese Websites From A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Started from the late 1960s, Internet has been developing for nearly 50 years. From the military use of preventing nuclear striking at the early development stages, to the nowadays worldwide use in every aspect of human life, Internet has attracted more than 1 billion users from all over the world by the end of 2005, according to the studies of the researching and consulting company eTForecasts. ETForecasts Company also forecasts that the total number of the global Internet users will reach 2 billion in the future 5 years. Thus as the most important application of Internet, website becomes a quite important norm for the worldwide netizens.As the birthplace of Internet, America is a leading country in the Internet field, which plays a vital role in the creation, promotion and development of the Internet. The number of American Internet users arrives at 175 million, ranking No. 1 in the world. China, since the sending of the first email in 1986, has been developing rapidly in this field. According to the statistical report of the China Internet Network Information Center, by the end of June 2006, the total number of Chinese Internet users broke 100 million, ranking No. 2 in the world, only after America. According to the studies of many consulting organizations (Ovum, In Statestimated and so on), probably China will surpass America and become the biggest Internet market in the world, driving the E-business onto an unprecedented prosperous point. The huge business opportunities attracted many websites from countries all round the world, headed by the Internet giant of America. The transferring of websites into China is not merely the procedure of translating websites into another language, but a comprehensive localization procedure with fully consideration of the preferences of the target users, in which culture plays an important role.Many scholars have devoted themselves studying the relationship between culture and websites design for both academic and commercial purposes. Professional analysts and designers generally agree that well-designed user interfaces improve the performance and appeal of the Web, helping to convert "tourists" or "browsers" to "residents" and "customers." The user-interface development process focuses attention on understanding users and acknowledging demographic diversity (Marcus, Gould, 2001).This thesis introduces the Hall's culture context model and Hofstede's five cultural dimensions, studies how American culture with low-context, low power distance, low uncertainty avoidance, high individualism, high masculinity, and short-term orientation and Chinese culture with high-context, high power distance, high collectivism, low masculinity and long-term orientation affect their websites design, makes a comparative study of the differences of American and Chinese websites from the cultural perspective with both qualitative and quantitative methods, and give suggestions to the American websites tending to transfer to China.