Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
The death of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej has led to stores running out of black and white clothing as the population mourns its leader in color-appropriate clothing. What does this …
In a development that few people will notice but is interesting to us domain geeks, Apple is in the process of retiring its news.apple.com domain in favor of apple.news. The .news domain …
For the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 15 consumer technology websites: Adobe Apple Canon Dell HP HTC Lenovo LG Microsoft Nikon Panasonic Samsung Sony Toshiba Xiaomi The …
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2016 Web Globalization Report Card and, with it, the top 25 …
And so it has begun: The world’s biggest online shopping day.
In China.
More than $9 billion dollars was spent this day last year and experts are forecasting a number well north of that this year.
As I’ve been doing for the past few years, I’ve collected a few screen grabs of localized websites in China. Here are the latest:
Nike
Apple can’t seem to rid itself of using flags on its global gateway. And, yes, I’ve been writing about this for awhile now.
Every time Apple launches a redesign I get my hopes up.
But this latest design merely offered up newly “flattened” map icons, as shown here:
Current Apple Global Gateway:
Previous Apple Global Gateway:
I read a brief report on digital Arabic content produced by the Wamda Research Lab, in partnership with Google and Taghreedat. A few data points jumped out at me, such as: By …
Four years ago, for the Web Globalization Report Card, I began noting (and rewarding) those websites that supported mobile devices. Even then one could easily see the virtual grounds shifting in favor of mobile …
In China, November 11th is known as Singles Day and it has quickly become the world’s biggest day for ecommerce. Tmall, the massive ecommerce website owned by Alibaba is already …
When you welcome visitors into your home, you probably don’t usher them directly to the basement. Yet when it comes to websites, this is exactly how many companies treat visitors from around the …
Every time Apple updates its web design (which it did recently) I get hopeful that the global gateway will receive a similar upgrade. But this has not yet happened. Apple’s global …
I’ve been meaning to write about this for awhile. A few months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly said this at an investor meeting: “When we work on making our devices …
Sometimes it’s difficult to see a revolution when you’re standing right in the middle of it. Which is how I still feel sometimes when it comes to web globalization. Web …
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. More than ten years ago I set out to create a report that benchmarked global websites. I looked at languages …
I’m optimistic about the year ahead. I base this optimism in part on discussions I’ve had this year with dozens of marketing and web teams across about ten countries. While …