Understanding Taiwanese Web Design: #1 Background information
This series of posts are going to focus on how I rationalize what I consider to be poor design choices in Taiwanese websites. Before I begin with the first topic, I’ll set up the series with some background observations that I gained during my time as a developer in a small web design studio here. Most of our clients were small businesses, so that has a huge impact on my experiences. These are just my opinions and would love to see some discussion below in the comments to see how they hold up against other people’s experiences.
Screen capture taken from the Taiwanese government site Culture.tw
1. Design is not respected in Taiwan
This attitude may be changing slowly thanks to the impact of Apple products in Taiwan, but basically being a designer in Taiwan means lots of work for very little money. Design here is treated the same as commercial artwork – it’s seen as a commodity with little importance (“drawing pretty pictures, anybody can do that”). How does that translate when you’re dealing with clients?
- They don’t listen to your informed guidance and often will push to have their design changes implemented even if they go against the goal of the design (“the boss’s girlfriend likes pink” -type stuff)
- You can’t charge by the hour here – this is a particularly painful point, because the client believes it’s her right to make as many changes over the course of the project thereby diminishing your already meager hourly average. I did have a client where we did charge for extra changes, but this was agreed beforehand and even if the extra charge was minimal, it did help to reduce the number of changes. However, most clients here don’t get that paradigm and just think it’s their right.
- They don’t really understand what you do, so you’ll get comments from clients like “I want more design” which just boggles the mind.
The worst part about this first thing is that there are a lot of low-cost web design providers that charge less than 50K NTD (~1600 USD) for a site and use cookie-cutter templates and other ways to reduce their costs. The drive towards the bottom means that the quality of most websites in Taiwan is pretty shocking and will continue that way until general understanding of design improves. The guys working in these el-cheapo web-shops are focused on quantity and speed, and don’t normally have the time (or onus) to study better methods.
2. Web design in Taiwan is focused on business image, rather than users and business goals
When you talk with clients about their website, it’s always about their business and the image they want to project. You’ll also find that your clients rarely have any business goals in mind when deciding to get a website (our competitor has one, so we need to get one, too). As a designer, it’s your job to bring the focus of the client back to the user and on the business goals they want to pursue. Normally, they’re thinking: Flash intro, lots of colors, visitor ticker, and any other bright, flashy widget they can stick on their page. You need to rise above this kind of thinking and put the focus on the right track, otherwise, there will be a lot of time wasted and frustration after they realize that the website doesn’t get them a return on investment.
3. Taiwanese web developers don’t love web standards
This is improving as more Taiwanese developers are working for companies like Yahoo!, but for a long time, Windows was the only OS in Taiwan. A lot of prominent local websites (even government ones!) only work or “work best” in Internet Explorer and up until the smartphone explosion and the rising adoption of Macs, that wasn’t a problem. However, this is a new day and age, and when your site’s navigation uses Flash (as a lot of bar, restaurant and hotel sites do) – say goodbye to your iPhone user who’s trying to get information while they’re on the street trying to decide what’s for dinner. There is a growing group of talented front-end engineers in Taiwan, but the vast majority of web-site builders here don’t have much awareness of standards, especially semantic HTML. They don’t really get what the tags are for (granted, they are markers for English language constructs), and it shows in their tag selection. It also means that if you are writing solid, semantic HTML for a Taiwanese website, by default you’re going to boost their search engine ranking because a lot of sites are still using table-based layouts and Flash.
I will be adding to this list as I think of more, but until then, I’m looking forward to reading about other people’s experiences in the comments section.
Categorised as: Design, HTML, Taiwan, Web development
Have you ever been a customer trying to use a Taiwanese website? That’s an experience and a half as the person usually has no clue that there is a website or what’s even on it. If you want to actually buy something you need to get to their local distributor or go to their business personally because they don’t understand web commerce outside of yahoo and rutgen(sp?).
I actually worked with a young lady who did the 30K NT per website thing. 50K must be a Taipei thing as you’d have difficulty getting customers in Changhua at that price. It was hard work, but the clients can’t see how to monetize nor use a website to grow their business because they are so afraid of their competitors. You put up your price and then your competitor can under cut your prices.
Website usage and design needs to come up a notch on the business client side. There’s no reason not to get it and with the ease of paying and sending things in Taiwan a website should be a tool to grow your business rather than an ego-stroking affair.
So right!!!!
I was doing this over 10 years ago and it was as follows:
1) Large, slow loading photo-based intro-page. Lots of KB/MB to load.
2) The info was largely to flatter the boss (# of patents, stock price, growth of the company, size of his schlong). Very little about products. No mention of teamwork… the boss did it all himself.
3) Animations… especially the flapping mailbox. Taiwanese love the flapping mailbox. There are also other cute cartoon characters that often make appearances on commercial websites.
4) The lack of meta-tags and other means for robots to find the site. There is also a lack of links to increase site value and traffic. Each site is an island.
I once had a supervisor shoot down my suggestions to re-do our clients sites to make them more efficient and relevant on the internet. You know… trim them down, add meta tags and frames an5d other improvements… in favor of simply adding a page where the client could submit their own URLs to a bunch of irrelevant search engines.
Maddening!
Yes, and the worst part is that you’re trying to help them. I’ll never forget the day (just last year!) when I saw the Vieshow Cinemas website’s redesign: they changed their entire site’s main navigation to Flash. It was a total facepalm moment – I mean this is after mainstream adoption of smartphones — what were they thinking?
[...] part one of this series, I gave some background about web design in Taiwan. In this part, I will expound on [...]
Opps. Is this what really happend in Taiwan Web industry? Actually I plan to go to Taiwan for the research on Taiwan Web Industry and web application. According to above comments about the website is isolated, just wondering if someone start to see this as opportunity? Opportunity to gather all the website into a single platform and start backup each others? Beside that, I notice a lot of developer using joomla and wordpress as their CMS for the website. Just wondering how many client can accept joomla and wordpress control panel? Coz for normal non IT worker, joomla and wordpress control panel are really hard for them.
Any comments?
I feel for you designers. Coming in from the point of view of a user, with usable but clunky Chinese language, I am get extremely distressed every time I attempt to visit any Taiwanese website, whether government, business, association,…. Animation and graphical overload, poor navigational information, and needing to dig through multiple levels of pages quickly exhausts my 2nd language stamina. Good luck in your fight!