[thelist] European websites: inter-country design differences?

[DESCHAMPS Stéphane DvSI/SICoR]

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]De la part de Francois Jordaan
>
> Hoping people could help me with a bit of research --
> pointers to articles
> would be great, but anecdotal would be better than nothing.

As far as I know, for french sites:

Three years ago clients really loved to have a splash-page graphic home page, with links to the top-level chapters included in this graphical design. Then you would go either to an introductory page (what we would usually call 'home') or directly to the specific chapter you'd be intersted in.

But now most french sites I know have evolved towards a newspaper-online approach, much akin to that of the american sites I was showing as models three years ago (because I mostly read american-based sites in those days, like webmonkey, etc).

I'm beginning to think that corporate websites, with globalisation and all, tend to homogenise their presentation world-wide. Easier to maintain, easier to understand from the visitor's point of view, in a kind of generalisation of navigation rules (you know, like "people tend to look for the logo in the upper-left corner whatever their country is, and tend to think of it as a convenient placeholder for a link back to the site's homepage", etc).

I'm not sure I'm clear in what I'm saying. Morning, morning... ;-)