Basic Web Design Tips for the Korean Market
Here’s a quick rap sheet for
WEB DESIGN FOR THE KOREAN MARKET
(aesthetically speaking):
Benchmarks:
Portal/search: use www.NAVER.com as you benchmark. Not Daum.
Community site: www.cyworld.com (and you must look at the pop-up “mini-hompies”–that’s the meat of it).
Commercial: www.cokeplay.com
Ecommerce: www.Gmarket.com
if you need other examples, you have to give me a specific area.
- Pastel colors, media rich, loud, flashy, lots of flash ok (esp. for menus and stuff like that)…ie: Let your designer go wild.
- and when in doubt…opt for “CUTE” style rather than “cool” (and don’t be afraid of cutsy characeters either.
- busy is fine…but its gotta very “CLEAN”! … like lots of CSS and very well layed out.
- Image IS important here….and a poorly designed website (ie: in terms of LOOK) can be taken as 1to1 to your ability and competence. Sure there are examples to the contrary…but generally speaking.
- most common screen resolution: 1024×768
- don’t worry about Firefox. no really. just forget it. I had 0% (ZERO) of my visitors (at 50,000 unique/day) using FF.
- its ok to use ENGLISH a lot of english to COMPLEMENT your korean. it makes you look cool and “international”.
- all the above is given somewhat more latititude if you are an “obviously US/foreign” company. Depends on the product though. Luxury items, or small items or company site etc…all have differnt levels of tolerance to styling and “english” focus.
- Follow SEO principles as that’s just good practice…but don’t fret over it….at all. 99.9% of the cases, you can’t break into this market on SEO. Google only has 0.57% (as of Nov 20)
of the search market here…and that’s about the only place SEO really gunna work for you. - be prepared to SPEND (registration fees, ad spend, etc) or else don’t expect anything from this market. No way around it for this market, unless you are here on the ground doing guerilla marketing.
- KOR language encoding and EUC-KR charset is best. UTF-8 won’t cut it.
for information on META TAGS here: What meta tags to use for Korean sites? - do some searches on the Korean market on this forum. I’ve written plenty about what to do/what’s up with the Korean market.
- Koreans are used to the internet at blazing speeds. Make sure you host is kick@ss or get one closer (or IN) korea (asia).
- definitely check out babelfish for a good laugh^^…but that’s about it. Its translations for Korean are so bad that I don’t even think you get the right idea from it.
Feel free to post more questions about the Korean market if you have em…but I don’t come around here conisistently so you you can pm for my email if you need more immediate help.
Good luck!
PS. Note:
setting your browser encoding to KOREAN, but having a site in English (ISO) works fine. but it may be hard to KEEP your browser in Korean as most will keep switching back to english encoding with each new page or refresh (as many browsers are set to “automatic” detecting language).
Also, avoid auto geo-location for your site. That’s what “country” selection menus are for. Make it accessible and self-explanatory and there will be no issue. Plus, this is standard practice in Korea. People are very used to the massive effort of choosing their location. Poorly implemented geo-location ends up with users that get “stuck” in countries they don’t necessarily want to be viewing.