Reebok en Español para Estados Unidos

According to Internet Retailer Reebok has just launched a Web site for the US Hispanic market: Barrio Rbk.

barriorbk_small.jpg

I’m clearly not in the target demographic as the site just annoyed the heck out of me. Why is it that shoe manufacturers see the need to cram as much Flash AV into every Web site they develop? Ironically, the Reebok store — the place where you actually bring in a few dollars — is still in English only. Nevertheless, I’m always glad to see another company embracing the 40+ million market in their own backyard.

On a separate note, I took a look at Reebok’s global gateway at www.reebok.com. This has to be the first gateway I’ve seen to use gothic lettering; pretty nifty.

reebok_gateway.jpg

The links for Japan, China, and Korea should be in the local language. The last I heard Flash now supports Unicode, so it’s not a technical limitation. I suspect Reebok left these links in Latin characters to prevent the appearance of “broken” links to Web users who don’t have the necessry fonts installed to display Japanese, Chinese, or Korean scripts.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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