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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether cultural backgrounds of nations are expressed through the web design of their companies. Actually, it investigates whether, in countries characterized by the same cultural matrix and language but by different national backgrounds, the cultural specificities of a country are a critical success factor for web design and enablers of business excellence.

Starting from a deep literature review, four research hypotheses on the relationship between cultural background and web design are formulated. By employing both the content analysis and the cross-tabulation methodology, these hypotheses are tested.

Brazilian, Portuguese, Angolan and Macanese web sites show that companies operating in these countries are aware that cultural background is a necessary success factor to consider for improving cross-cultural management of computer-mediated communication. Indeed, the findings confirm that the internet is not a culturally neutral communication medium. By providing evidences of web site cultural adaptation, this study supports the use of a targeted approach to web site design and provides managerial guidelines for improving business excellence of companies’ online environment.

The paper offers insights into the topic of a culturally adapted computer-mediated communication for improving consumer experience.

To date, most published work concerning effective Web site design has been based on personal opinion or experience, not on research. Uses 50 in‐depth interviews with Web site designers to identify key design considerations and online customer conversion and relationship strategies. A proposed model illustrates a direct relationship between Web site design and the online customer conversion process. Relationship marketing, integrated marketing communications, and segmenting, targeting, and positioning should guide both Web site design and customer conversion. Ultimately, a Web site should help to establish, build, and maintain long‐term customer relations. Managerial implications are introduced and discussed.

Designing a truly customer focused Web site can be difficult. This paper examines the approach of adapting the existing database design technique of normalisation for achieving customer focused Web site design. A Web site can be thought of as a multimedia database, in fact under European law a Web site is legally classified as being a database. In traditional database design, normalisation is used to structure data and provide efficient keys for data retrieval. In Web site normalisation “data” is now the text, images, and functions (for example, e‐mail and ordering goods) that are required on the Web site. Keys for “data” are now Web site headings, sub‐groupings, and topics. Web site normalisation allows the Web site designer to structure Web site material and identify the optimal Web site navigational structure from a customer perspective, and thus, produce a truly customer focused Web site. A case study in a UK marketing organisation is provided in order to demonstrate and evaluate Web site normalisation in action.

The World Wide Web is an increasingly popular tool for accessing information via the Internet. It derives from many individuals and organisations making information available using the medium of hypertext. The pages they create are sometimes wonderful, informative and entertaining but more often haphazard, confusing and difficult to navigate. Yet there exists a body of work and experience in the areas of hypertext design and human‐computer interaction (HCI) which should be influencing Web page design. This paper examines some of the main issues from these fields and how they apply to the Web. It proposes a set of guidelines for Web page design. Does your page satisfy these guidelines?

The rapid adoption of the Web as a commercial medium has caused firms to experiment with innovative ways of doing business. Those firms that effectively market themselves on the Web have a distinct advantage. This paper presents two e‐commerce Web site design strategies and 12 e‐commerce models for gaining that advantage.

A social movement is sweeping the globe in the form of Internet delivered and open access sharing spaces. People are connecting in new ways while personalizing their daily experiences with shared websites called Web 2.0 technologies. This chapter looks into the implications of taking these technologies beyond social interactions into the learning experiences of students. With a literature review and case study analysis, the goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of what is needed to appropriate quality instructional strategies to the online university course room including social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life®, and wikis. Following a brief history and descriptions of the Web 2.0 sites and functions, the reader is introduced to the design expectations typical of instructional designers (IDs) with definitions and standards from the field's literature. Support is offered from the business and educational literature for incorporating leadership into design practice through vision, strategy, and theory-based decisions. Definitions, benchmarks, and examples of instructional strategies and activities for learner engagement complete the theoretical framework for the chapter. Given the added complexities of advanced technologies, this chapter suggests evaluating social learning through an ID leadership perspective for a more informed recommendation of Web 2.0 online affordances. Following a case analysis of Second Life®, a 3-D virtual world used for learning activities, implications for ID practice are discussed, along with the various benefits and barriers of adopting Web 2.0 technologies. In the conclusion, suggestions are given for future research on the potential for integration of Web 2.0 affordances into online learning designs for rich, engaging learning experiences.

Design prescriptions to create web‐based courses and sites that are dynamic, easy‐to‐use, interactive and data‐driven, emerge from a “how to do it” approach. Unfortunately, the theory behind these methods, prescriptions, procedures or tools, is rarely provided and the important terms, such as “easy‐to‐use”, to which these prescriptions refer are not defined. The empirical results reported here bring lighting on the meaning of several design prescriptions that contain qualitative attributes. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning of several web‐based course design prescriptions found in the literature in the context of two music web‐based courses. Two examples are presented and the results of the students’ assessment regarding several design prescriptions are given. First, what we learned while producing the first release of the web part of an undergraduate music course entitled Teaching and Music Technology is presented. Then, what else we learned when the second release was assessed by students is detailed. The next part concerns what we used while developing the undergraduate music course French‐Canadian folk which gives access to several music files and scores. Again the results of the students’ assessment are presented. The list of the various technologies that must be highly mastered to produce such musical content is given.

This column seeks to recommend five basic principles that should be used when a library web site is designed or refactored.

Explores the options available when creating or redesigning a library web site

This column is simply exploratory, and examines issues surrounding the initial design or re‐design of a library web site.

The design of a library web site should take into account these five principles as they are outlined in this column, and those principles include: simplicity, user centered design, findability, web standards and accessibility.

This column suggests five principles that will assist librarians and library technology workers in designing better web sites which follow usability principles, web standards and accessibility guidelines. This will hopefully improve the quality of library web based resources and services.

This column aims to examine web design methodology given the rapid proliferation of internet accessible devices, and to offer as a solution responsive web design. Responsive web design changes the focus from being device and template centered to being content centered, which is appropriate for the types of services that libraries offer in the web context.

This is an exploratory column. A brief review of the current literature regarding responsive web design was done prior to writing the column.

Libraries should benefit greatly, both regarding the time invested in web design, as well as the effectiveness of services offered on the web, if responsive design is adopted.

Responsive web design is relatively new, and is still being explored by professional web developers. Libraries that are able to adopt this methodology early on will be ahead of the curve of rapidly multiplying devices used to access the internet.

To create a benchmark for design evaluation of commercial web sites, to model customers' site navigation behavior, and to develop and implement algorithms for link‐structure personalization.

The principal methodology used for design benchmarking is a survey of corporate web sites of some US Fortune 500 companies and top Indian companies and statistical analysis of the data so collected. The principal methodological approach for modeling user behavior, user's interest and algorithms for link‐structure personalization, is the development of a Markov decision process (MDP) in the overall framework of a semi‐Markov model and implementing the same in a link‐structure personalization system.

It is observed that the functional web site features significantly differ for the sites dealing with various product categories whereas the non‐functional features do not. The over‐stressed or under‐stressed features in the Indian web sites are found. The statistics generated from the user behavior model are validated against the real life user behavior and found satisfactory. The appropriateness of the link‐structure personalization algorithms is established by comparing the set of links generated by the algorithm with the links generated by the optimal policy of the underlying MDP.

The corporate that have been considered are conglomerates offering a number of products and services. But we categorize these sites based on their major product offering. Our approach of modeling the user behavior as a semi‐Markov process is possible because of our advanced implementation infrastructure. Undesirable network effects like delays, bandwidth, etc. may not make such a model that attractive in a very traditional type of environment. But the data collected in such environment can still be mined after adequate pre‐processing and appropriate normalization

Using the benchmark proposed in this model a webmaster can evaluate his web site. The sites with low site evaluation index can be improved by adding features with high weight depending on the product offering of the company. Webmaster can design the three level information architecture described in the paper and subsequently implement link‐structure personalization algorithm to improve site navigability. Besides improving site navigability the user behavior data collected thereon can be mined to generate other valuable information.

To assess and enhance the usability of an ecommerce site our work proposes: a benchmark to evaluate commercial web site design; a stochastic model to study and understand user behavior; an algorithm to personalize link‐structure of a commercial web site, and a general framework to implement a link‐structure personalization system.