First of all, this device looks really cool. The ocean also looks inviting right about now. But while visiting the Flite website I couldn’t help but notice the US flag in the upper right corner. Perfect placement, by the way, for the global gateway menu.

I was in Ecuador recently and carved a bit of time to visit a few global websites — as in the .com address of global brands — to see just how successfully (or not) these brands localize for Ecuadorians. No huge surprises overall — companies that lead the Web Globalization Report Card tend to do above-average in this market. Note that my web browser was set to English so many websites defaulted to displaying English-language content.

I’ve announced the top 25 global websites from the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card. But that only tells part of the story. To better understand how companies compete against their peers, I grouped the websites into 13 categories — from automotive to financial services to travel & hospitality. Below is the list of categories, as well as which company website emerged on top. The…

We’ve heard of peak oil and peak TV to indicate a point in time when growth ends and decline begins. It appears that we have reached a similar peak in languages. Last year was the first time in 19 editions of the Web Globalization Report Card that the net total of languages added and lost fell into negative territory. As seen below, the average number of languages supported by the…

I’m pleased to announce the publication of the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the 19th annual edition of the Report Card, yes, 19th. And while there are a number of very familiar faces in this list, there are some new entrants worth highlighting as well. But let’s first look at the top 25 global websites: Wikipedia emerged on top yet again…

I’ve been meaning to share each of these links for some time now but life has gotten in the way. Better late than never! Australia makes .AU more user friendly If you want to visit the home page of say, Amazon in the UK, you have to go to amazon.co.uk. Contrast that with Canada and many other countries, in which you simply tack the country code to the end of the domain: amazon.ca. Australia…

Klarna is one of those Buy Now Pay Later companies that is seemingly on every ecommerce checkout page these days. And, not surprisingly, the company is expanding globally at a rapid pace. Shown here is the Japan home page: Francesco Cutolo, a designer at Klarna, recently presented at Sigma Config on how his company developed its global font strategy — and the decision making process behind it. In short, the company decided to fall back on system fonts which, in my opinion, is the best approach when you consider…

Last year, I noted that Mailchimp had begun its global expansion with a few rookie mistakes. Mailchimp was using its super-header to announce support for multiple languages: The globe icon was (and is) perfect. But the location was not sustainable; the global gateway needed to find a dedicated location that did not take up an entire header element. Also, if you selected, say, German, you’d see…

Stripe processed more than $640 billion last year on behalf of millions of Internet-enabled businesses. And while this number is huge, the founders of Stripe, in a recent letter to employees and customers, emphasized that we’re still in the early days of global ecommerce. Specifically, they noted that “ online…