Not really sure and I doubt it will be the same as us in summer 2000 in the west, but after a few weeks navigating thoses countries, and specially China, they seem to reproduce the same bad patterns we saw between 98 and 2001 over here. Overloaded site with ads and oversaturate with flashy colors and stupids animated gif files floating around your screen with the new css layers they discover. But the market is there and you can saw more and more professional site if you use the good SE to find it.
But for us, it is a really huge work to write text to avoid censor. If you talk about a spring collection with a red blood color, your can be in trouble with the automatic censorship system.
3 comments:
Interesting observation although mine is a bit different on some points.
I have been asking Chinese (I live in Shanghai, I am Dutch)whether they like all those flashy, up-popping (each clicked link opens up in a new screen), densed text websites. The jury is still out.
Pop-ups: They are part of the user experience and mostly ignored it seems. If you see the average taskbar of a chinese user it's full of the small IE logo's.
Flash: way too much but also already a part of the user experience since a long time so probably less intrusive as "westerners" would regard it
Dense text: Partly due to the Chinese script, partly as this is how they started and they haven't changed. Participating in a user panel here, while looking at websites some respondents noticed that some western websites had too much white.
From my own experience a lot of websites, design wise are still 1997 + Flash so I agree with you there.
Besides the real big one who probably don't want to change to much interface wise , a lot of company websites are driven by the taste of the buyer.
For example: The buyer likes flash, evenmore the buyer doesn't want sometimes a "skip this" button and is not yet in the face of realizing the value of having a good, useful website that can serve as an addition to his marketing and sales.
I am not so sure how fast it will change due to the earlier mentioned fact that in the West surfers are used to cleaner designed website without (too many) pop-ups. In China they stepped in a later stage and are used to their kind of websites.
Censorship is here and probably for the coming time to stay but that doesn't mean it is so tight as perceived by the west.
I can hardly imagine you can't write something like "spring collection with a red blood color". Censorship is mostly on political keywords.
Lastly about the Bubble. My personal opinion that it indeed a bubble. It's the China bubble combined with the Internet Bubble, together it's a big thing to float on. And it is of course a very interesting online market to corner, already 113 million users and counting. Hence all the VC's and big american internet wigs coming and investing. The challenge here is that the majority of thes users first have to start making money before they become online buyers. Secondly online paying is still in it's infancy. I think the bubble will burst first and then things will even out.
Ok, so much for my babbling. Next time I write it on my own blog:)
Great obversations and thanks for the comment. You should post your blog url !
I actually thought I had included my url but I guess I got lost in the blogger interface.:)
Hope it works now or otherwise, see www.chinasnippets.com which has actually more general content than pure seo.
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