A PYRAMID OF CULTURAL MARKERS FOR GUIDING CULTURAL-CENTERED LOCALIZED WEBSITE

During the last five years, we have done several s tudies aiming at understanding the link between website design and t he user’s culture. From these studies we have identified a number of cultural mar kers that affect website usability, understanding and acceptance. Based on th ese results, this paper offers five groups of cultural markers to be used as guide lines for designing user cultural-centered localized websites. The five grou ps are organized as levels in a pyramid and in this way it allows for different deg r es of localization. Also internationalization can be achieved using this cul tura markers pyramid.