A Pyramid of Cultural Markers for Guiding Cultural-centered Localized Website Design

During the last five years, we have done several studies aiming at understanding the link between website design and the user’s culture. From these studies we have identified a number of cultural markers that affect website usability, understanding and acceptance. Based on these results, this paper offers five groups of cultural markers to be used as guidelines for designing user cultural-centered localized websites. The five groups are organized as levels in a pyramid and in this way it allows for different degrees of localization. Also internationalization can be achieved using this cultural markers pyramid.