A Comparative Study Of Homepages Of Sino-american Superior Hotels From Culture Perspectives

According to the culture and communication theory of Edward Hall, cultural variables have a great impact on human communication–verbal or nonverbal. Website is a new tool for human communication. Specifically, website is a kind of nonverbal communication online. Thus, culture definitely has some influences on the website design. Some scholars have investigated the importance of culture in web communication. Some even advocate studying the cultural content of a website from cross-cultural perspectives. They mainly focus on proving that cultures really influence website design. They confirm that Hofstede's five culture dimensions theories (uncertainty avoidance, power distance, collectivism/individualism, masculinity/ femininity and long/short-term orientation) and Hall's context theory (high-/low-context) can be used in cross-cultural website studies. However, the research material involves many industries.With the prosperity of hotel industry, many hotels have started their own websites. Some even build multilanguage websites. Thus, it is critical to study homepages of hotel websites. For the existence of culture transfer, it will inevitably influence the website design when designers construct a website using a foreign language rather than their mother tongue. Therefore, the research focus is to see how mother culture embodies itself in foreign language (refers to English homepage in this thesis) homepage design.Besides the above stated culture dimension theories, the author adds another one dimension here in this study, which is Trompenaars'synchronic vs. sequential time, to see how culture influences the superior hotel homepage design and in what aspects. The author studies the English language homepages of Sino-American superior hotels from the cross-cultural perspectives by establishing and testing six hypotheses. The six hypotheses are: (1) Chinese hotel homepages have less high uncertainty avoidance features; (2) Chinese hotel homepages have more high power distance features; (3) Chinese hotel homepages have more collectivist features; (4) Chinese hotel homepages have more long-term orientation features; (5) Chinese hotel homepages have more high-context culture features; (6) Chinese hotel homepages have more synchronic culture features. With the exception of Hypothesis (1) and Hypothesis (6), all the others are proven. This study proves that culture does have some impact on hotel homepage design. This research not only enriches the cross-culture communication theory, but also gives some insights for hotel website designers and hotel marketers.