Cultural usability in the globalisation of news portal

Abstract

The paper aims to identify areas of web usability in the News Portal industry that may be culturally specific so that web designers would target these areas when designing web sites. It also explores the current state of globalising these web sites in terms of catering for languages of users. Findings indicates that cultural preferences are shown to exist in terms of the number of animations used in the web page, the graphical density and length of the web page, navigation menu display, colour and family, male and female related images. In addition, it was found that majority of the web sites from the sample does not cater for language of different users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.