Extending A Croos Cultural Analysis Framework To The Study Of Us And Chinese Steel Company Website Design

From the early 1990s, some creative IC (Intercultural Communication) scholars began to apply IC theories to the analysis of website design. In this thesis, the author continues the efforts by proposing a totally new cross cultural analysis framework for analyzing the website design of companies. This new framework consists of three parts: website analysis, cultural analysis and a website cross cultural analysis matrix. The website analysis part deals with how to analyze the differences on website design; the cultural analysis part discusses the cultural differences between the countries where the websites are chosen from; and the third part connects these two together and guides the researchers to figure out how cultural differences influence the website design. The author also extends this new framework to the cross cultural analysis of steel companies'websites from the US and China to test its feasibility. The application to the analysis of US and Chinese steel company websites shows the feasibility of this new framework. The websites differences are identified and explained by IC theories. Naturally, the new framework has its own limitations, for instance, it is designed to analyze company website, and may have neglected some aspects, however, the author hopes the design of this new framework will give more inspirations to IC scholars who are also interested in this field.This thesis consists of seven parts. The first part, introduction, briefly states the background and significance of the study. The second part gives an overview of the definition of culture and cultural dimension theories. The third part introduces Edward Hall's dimension of High-context vs. Low-context, Hofstede's five cultural dimensions, and Trompenarrs'Sequentialism and Synchronism dimension. In the fourth part, the author gives a review of the development of the cross cultural analysis of the website design. In the fifth part, a new cross cultural analysis framework for website design is put forward. In the sixth chapter, the author applies the new framework into the cross cultural analysis of US and China steel company websites design. In the last part, the conclusion, the author points out the limitations of the new framework and concludes that cross cultural analysis of websites needs more attention to further develop.