Designing Localized Web Sites

Abstract

The term World Wide Web (WWW) emphasizes that the Web is global and many companies realize that this creates new opportunities. A considerable amount of literature on web site development stresses that, in order to attract and retain more customers, it is vital to create different versions of a web site and adapt those versions to the local communities they target. This process is usually called globalization and the different web site versions are called localized web sites. Although content management systems (CMS) for web sites provide support for multinational web sites, current web site design methodologies do not consider the issue of globalization. In general, the globalization effort is done after the web site is designed and implemented. This makes globalization much harder. In this paper, we show how to extend an existing web site design method, WSDM, to support the design of localized web sites.