A major corporation hires the best technologists it can find to create a specialized website to serve its clients. The site is functionally superb, easily navigable, colorful, fun, and full of surprises. It is also full of surprises that their clients do not expect. Produced by the twenty-something, electronic whiz kids at the ad agency, it is laden with of insider humor, innuendo and assumptions not shared by its target population. Symbols and images are easily misunderstood, and, in one case, culturally insulting.
Several links take the user to the edge of pornography.
In short, many thousands of dollars are being spent to develop a website that is technically brilliant and culturally-incompetent . We hope this is not the situation for your website. Better late than never, the company in this story hired an interculturalist to review the site before it went online. More money was spent to re-orient the site effectively to its target population. Let's review some of the cultural opportunities and hazards of creating an electronic presence, and outline some useful tips for those who would create interfaces for their organization on the public Internet, on industry or corporate intranets, or put online forums and knowledge management systems in place.