Thinking about your Global Web Strategy
(Left: World Population Map, first spotted from Ted Rheingold)
Many corporations and organizations love to build web apps as they can easily and quickly scale the whole planet.
But before you slap on Kanji and German on your top navigation and copy and paste folders into a new folder you’ve got to first think about the ramifications of doing so.
There’s a few things to think about before you begin a Global Web Strategy:
Is your business direction and focus ready for Global?
Do you understand users well enough in the regions you’re seeking
Is your website architecture scalable, flexible, and able to change when having multiple versions?
For the current population, you can see from this map above that most of the world’s population is in Asia.
For Internet Adoption you can check out these stats on who’s using the web, and subsequent growth rates.
Lastly, during Bay Chi Web this week, Kelly Goto discussed that China’s youth has only 9 dollars in currency to spend online a year, which is vastly different than the hundreds or thousands North American youths spend.
Leave a comment if you’ve got more to share.
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Another thing to consider: Are you ready to field inquiries in a foreign language? This has both technical and business process ramifications. Accepting double-byte characters in your forms and databases is not necessarily the default setup. Also, do you have the back office staff to handle foreign language transactions and inquiries that your site my generate if targeting foreign countries?
$9 per head and a huge market or $9000 per head from a smaller market? Depends what your product offer and fulfilment process are. Distributing fully automated information products can work to low profit high volume markets if your systems can keep the business running whilst you are investing your time elsewhere.
Like Brian, I agree that localization is an important & often overlooked aspect of a company.
Internet users expect all sites to offer services in their country (after all, the site is on the web!). Even though the company I work for currently only has listings for the USA, I constantly get inquiries from folks overseas & some people get upset that we don’t service their market(s).