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Gollywog
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Debussy's brain
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 Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 4:14 am Post subject: 10 Ways Koreans Don't Design Web Sites |
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Anyone who has ever loaded a Korean web page will get a kick out of this article:
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/10-ways-to-design-a-good-web-site/
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10 Ways to Design a Good Web Site
By Azadeh Ensha
(Summary points listed only)
DO LEAD BY EXAMPLE
DO MAKE THE WEB SITE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY
DO YOUR RESEARCH
DO TEST YOUR WEB SITE
DON�T GET FLASH DRUNK
DON�T ELIMINATE ALL WHITE SPACE
DON�T MAKE THE USER WAIT
DON�T BOUNCE AROUND
DON�T CLUTTER THE HOME PAGE
DON�T FORGET ABOUT CONTENT |
Korean web designer: "White space? What's white space?"
Make web pages compatible with non-IE browsers? Un-Korean!
Use actual fonts instead of graphics text to make it search engine friendly? Hey, but then foreigners might be able to translate it. |
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tfunk
Joined: 12 Aug 2006
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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| Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 4:13 am Post subject: Re: 10 Ways Koreans Don't Design Web Sites |
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On the subject of Korean web design...
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DO MAKE THE WEB SITE SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY
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Google has different algorithms than Naver, Daum. So different principles apply for making a Korean website SEF.
A lot of Korean websites are based upon the same template and design. This is potentially a usability bonus, as people familiar with the navigational layout of one website don't have to re-learn the conventions on another website.
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| DO TEST YOUR WEB SITE |
Why would you test your website on non-IE browsers when less than 1% of your audience use it?
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| DON�T GET FLASH DRUNK |
and
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| DON�T ELIMINATE ALL WHITE SPACE |
Korean audiences expect and react to certain graphical styles. Most of the Korean website I've visited load quickly in Korea. Similar principles apply to the rest of the points you've raised. Your points only seem valid if Koreans are designing websites for a foreign audience.
Developing websites for non-IE browsers is a poor business decision. The current graphical style of Korean websites is in vogue within Korea. |
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makemischief
Joined: 04 Nov 2005
Location: Traveling
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| Posted: Sun May 03, 2009 4:45 am Post subject: Re: 10 Ways Koreans Don't Design Web Sites |
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| tfunk wrote: |
Your points only seem valid if Koreans are designing websites for a foreign audience.
Developing websites for non-IE browsers is a poor business decision. The current graphical style of Korean websites is in vogue within Korea. |
Definitely some truth to this BUT it is changing fast, even in Korea.
Personal example: watching my Korean friends swear up and down at Naver's search engine as it takes forever to find what they are looking for (searching Korean sites) and then when they finally get to the site having to head for the sitemap just to get to the bottom of the mess. Some of these friends were just average Koreans, although the more pissed off ones were web designers 
This is just anecdotal, but does point to problems.
That said Garr Reynolds (Presentationzen.com) who loves white space had a whole rundown on why Japanese customers at least often prefer text overload (compare Yahoo Japan with Yahoo USA).
It'll be interesting to see what happens with big players like Google beginning to buy up small Korean web companies.
As for developing for Non-IE- I'd say that is short sighted, especially as even IE moves away from supporting ActiveX, and browsers such as Firefox become popular enough that they are automatically installed on many computers (all of my Uni's computers have it on their media consoles). The other way around is still unfortunately true- to not design with IE in mind (ugly as it is) is bad business. |
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Blueberry
Joined: 15 Apr 2009
Location: Wonju
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| Posted: Mon May 04, 2009 1:06 am Post subject: |
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Korea actually has a severe shortage of capable programmers--both web and non. Plenty with the degree, but past transcribing existing code, only a precious few could write a program from scratch.
It's been talked about as a big problem for designing phones with "apps." The companies say they can make the phones app capable, but that there aren't enough programmers in Korea capable of write apps, so it would be like building a mall with no retail tenants. |
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pkang0202
Joined: 09 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Wed May 06, 2009 6:59 pm Post subject: |
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Naver Search is worthless.
The difference between Naver and Google is not their algorithms. The difference is Google is constantly optimizing their search engine to get the best possible Results. Naver does nothing except collect Ad revenue, and bump sponsors to the top of the list.
Naver's 지식IN is trash, but its the best resource available in trying to find information in Korea. The problem is the search in that section doesn't bother giving results by date. So, an entry from 2005 is already outdated. |
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detourne_me
Joined: 26 May 2006
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| Posted: Wed May 06, 2009 10:13 pm Post subject: |
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IE takes too dang long to load up any page, regardless if it's Korean or not, but usually Korean pages take much longer to load.
Firefox isn't all that great either, I've moved on to to Chrome, which is incredibly fast, with no plug-ins or sidebars to load up.
Speaking about website speed...whatsup with eslcafe? the servers probably can't handle the amount of BS that goes through here a day.
Mod Edit. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 6:18 am Post subject: |
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I kind of agree with tfunk.
In the west, you still get sites that look like a magazine page, you get great blocks of text with no links, and often there isn't support for the same range of online functions you get here. It's backward.
I don't mind 'clutter' on a webpage when, as here, it isn't in offensive colours and doesn't cause page loading delay. If we were as skilled readers of Korean as we are of English it would probably look a lot less like 'clutter' and a lot more like plain information anyway. |
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superacidjax
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 7:45 am Post subject: Re: 10 Ways Koreans Don't Design Web Sites |
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| tfunk wrote: |
| Developing websites for non-IE browsers is a poor business decision. |
Are you serious? Good web design is not browser specific. Browser-specific web design is BAD business because it creates all sorts of issues with accessibility.
In the context of web site design, accessibility is a measure of how easy it is to access, read, and understand the content of a web site. Accessibility is complicated by the fact that a web site is not a published piece of work so much as a living document that can be interpreted in different ways by different browsers and on different platforms. Web sites are not a print medium- although they are most often read in a visual manner, there are many different ways a web page can be experienced, such as via a speech browser or via an indexing robot. A web page is a combination of textual information which is interpreted appropriately by a browser and linked to files of various types, such as graphics, movie clips and sound files.
Since a web page can be interpreted differently by different browsers with different capabilites, and since the language of a web page- HTML, is constantly evolving, accessibility must be considered to make a page usable by as many people as possible. The keys to making your page accessible are graceful degradation, standards compliance, fast loading, and intelligent organization.
Since HTML is continually changing and different browsers support different elements, graceful degradation is the key to making sure that pages are readable and accessible in all browsers. When a browser encounters tags it doesn't understand or can't display, degradation takes place. Whether this degradation will cause some of your page content to be lost to the browser, or whether the content of your page can still be accessed fully is dependent on whether the degradation is graceful.
The HTML standards were written with graceful degradation in mind- new attributes to older tags are safely ignored so that the rest of the tag can still function normally, and new tags are written with alternative display for browsers that don't support them in mind. There are many elements of HTML that can't be displayed or can be turned off in browsers that were written with the knowledge of these elements- such as images, java, and frames. Using the appropriate methods to provide an alternative message to those who can't see those elements or have turned them off is one way to design for graceful degradation.
The web operates with worldwide standards. It's provincial and stupid to design sites for specific browsers, even in Korea. No major corporation would design browser specific sites.. not even Microsoft.
After all, Koreans also access the web from mobile devices which overwhelmingly DON'T use IE.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
Korean web design is graphically debatable (some can argue good, some say bad,) but one thing that is seemingly universal among Korean web sites is the large number of errors present in pages, flash that sometimes works, java that is moody, all sorts of errors. That isn't "cultural" that's simply a function of the groupthink that seems to pervade all aspects of Korean society. Innovation and modernization is allowed only when approved by Samsung.
It seems that Koreans are so proud to actually have electricity that they throw everything into pages as densely as possible, causing information overload and clutter. It's kind of like the Korean obsession with over-lighting rooms with harsh, brilliantly bright light as opposed to using directional light sources such as lamps. We've all been in the Korean apartments where the only light is that "light of God" and any attempt to turn out excess lights is met by Koreans with a questioning look. Almost as if to say, "We're modern, we have light, let's us it all." It's not unlike the guy with the Posche that parks directly in front of a club simply to show everyone that he has a Posche.
Just because a culture has technology, it doesn't mean that their use of technology is mature. Design-wise, Korean websites generally look like they were designed by a hyper 13 year old. Koreans seem to "like" it, but that's only because that's all they know. Samsung and Naver haven't yet approved anything else.
The google search page minimalism would likely cause seizures in Korean children. |
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