The Culturally Customized Web Site

Singh and Pereira (2005) wrote The Culturally Customized Web Site: Customizing Web Sites for the Global Marketplace. At first glance, this read combines a balanced amount of text and visuals and is deceptive in its simplicity. Moving through the book is easy enough. The table of contents highlights what is to come and the book is singularily focused on culture and web design. The complexity comes in the depth of the topic.

Culture is defined differently among varying disciplines and it often encompasses more than people realize. Singh and Pereira (2005) discussed perception, gender, power, patterned-ways of thinking and behaving and described how aspects such as languages, symbolism, and color mean different things based on one’s culture. They illustrated the importance of considering these and other factors while designing web sites.

The strength of this book lies in the authors’ ability to combine the what, why, and how into one. There are graphs, statistics, principles, resources and instructions for readers. The impact of globalization in terms of communication and the online marketplace was written about throughout each chapter. The only criticsm of note was that the authors assume some basic knowledge of web sites and web design that the general public may not have.

- Nick Frush

Reference:

Singh, N. & Pereira, A. (2005). The culturally customized web site: Customizing websites for the global marketplace. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann

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