Cultural Differences In Hotel Web Page Design And Their Implications

Intercultural web studies is a newly emerging area of study for intercultural communication research. Marcus and Gould's study on the relations between Hofstede's five value dimensions and the characteristics of web site design (2000) was the first study of this kind. Literature review shows that few studies have examined how cultural factors influence the web page design of a specific industry. This thesis is intended to fill this blank by applying Hofstede's value framework to analyzing cultural differences in Chinese and US hotel web page design. Theoretically, this thesis is expected to review intercultural web studies and to test the applicability of Hofstede's theory. Practically, it provides suggestions for hotel web page designers, and offers specific information that is needed for our Internet project.This thesis adopts the research methodology of literature studies and content analysis. Since hotel web page design bears the features of both web page design and the hotel industry, concepts of web page design and features of the hotel industry are introduced in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 is focused on Hofstede's five value dimensions and their applications in web studies. On the basis of a content analysis of 20 Chinese and 20 US hotels, Chapter 4 formulates a framework for analyzing hotel web pages. The findings of this research prove that, among Hofstede's five value dimensions, Uncertainty Avoidance has the most noticeable effect on hotel web page design. This thesis finally reaches the conclusions that the Internet and the web sites are heavily influenced by the designers'cultural values as well as those of the expected users, and that web page design will continue to be a fertile area for intercultural research.