A Comparative Study Of The Homepage Design Of Chinese And American University Websites From An Intercultural Perspective

Started in the1960s in America, Internet now has become a vitalpart of this information society and greatly facilitates people’scommunication. As the carrier of the Internet, websites have becomethe basic access to information. According to the culture andcommunication theory of Edward Hall， culture greatly influencespeople’ s communication. Websites is another form of humancommunication. To be more specific, website is a kind of nonverbalcommunication online, through which humans can get information andshare information with each other. Scholars then begin to study thecultural differences in the websites which is called intercultural websitestudy.Intercultural study of websites is comparatively a new study area forintercultural communication. Hofstede’s five value dimensions (powerdistance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism,masculinity/femininity, long-term/short-term orientation) and EdwardHall’s High-context and Low-context theory are the theories that aremainly applied in these studies. Marcus and Gould’s study on therelations between Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions and thecharacteristics of website design was the first study of this kind. Thescholars mainly try to prove that culture can really influence websitesdesign and put up some suggestions for the website designers fromcultural perspectives.This thesis is intended to enrich the intercultural study by studyingthe cultural differences reflected in Chinese and American universitywebsites.20Chinese university websites and20American universitywebsites were chosen as the study sample. The study mainly focuses onthe graphical elements and page organization of the homepages ofthe university websites. Research methodology of literature studies and content analysis is adopted in this thesis to study the cultural differencesbetween Chinese and American university websites. Based on therelations of webpage characteristics and Hofstede’s five culturaldimensions proposed by Marcus and Gould,17hypotheses areproposed. The hypotheses are tested by the data of the culturalmarkers from the university websites.The findings in this study prove that cultures do have influences onthe design of university websites. Thus, the differences of the designs ofthe Chinese university websites and American websites are explained.Among the five cultural dimensions of Hofstede, the dimensions ofpower distance and individualism/collectivism have the greatestinfluence. It is also hoped that this study can be of some value to theuniversity websites designers.