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

With the development of Internet, a new concept “Internet +” has been brought out. The worldwide use of Internet connects with people’s life more closely than before and more and more companies take part in online marketing activities.Scholars apply Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Edward T. Hall’s high-context and low-context cultural theories to website cultural analysis. The researches cover many fields such as hotel, library, automobile and college website designs. It is worth mentioning that Yu(2012) has selected six dimensions from Fons Trompenaars’ s cultural dimensions and proposes a nine –dimension framework to analyze cultural influence on website designs.So far, however, few scholars have probed into the intercultural differences in medical company website designs. Based on the Yu’s nine-dimension framework, this thesis employs content analysis as research methodology and makes a comparative analysis of fifteen Chinese and American medical company homepage designs respectively and tries to answer the following questions:(1) Are there cultural differences between Chinese and American medical company homepage designs?(2)If any, what are these cultural differences?(3) What factors cause these cultural differences?(4)Is Yu’s nine-dimension framework suitable for intercultural analysis of homepage designs?The results show that there are cultural differences between Chinese and American medical company homepage designs. Chinese medical company homepages tend to choose company CEOs as the spokesmen and there are more product displays and fewer colorful pictures presented on the homepages. American medical company homepages, on the contrary, tend to present pictures of normal people and the colors of pictures are rich and emotional. It also proves that Yu’s nine-dimension framework can be used in analyzing homepage designs. In the end,this thesis offers suggestions to Chinese website designers that they should add more social contents to their websites, to present pictures of normal people instead of thecompany CEOs and to provide more colors on the homepages to realize effective communication with oversea buyers.