The work deals with the current burning issue of cultural differences. These issues relate to the expression of culture and one's home country within the mediums of the Internet and online communication. Based on the research of previous studies, this work aims to demonstrate the influence of cultural dimensions in web design and content. In a sample of the largest beer producers in the Czech Republic, Japan and Great Britain supplemented with the largest international brewing companies are analyzed components which characterize cultural differences. The main scope of this study is based on assumptions and theories according to G. Hofstede and E. T. Hall. It thus demonstrates the influence of culture and dimensions -- Collectivism/Individualism, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, High/Low Context, Masculinity/Femininity, Time Orientation and Colour symbolism. It is recommended that companies pay more attention to the cultural adaption of web communication, which can bring more clarity and attractiveness, and also a higher added value to the customer himself.

Smartphone usage is higher than ever and the number is steadily increasing, but not all websites on the Internet are adapted for use on smartphones. This study set out to find common and proven guidelines from the current scientific literature and create a guide on how to best adapt a desktop website to be optimized for use on smartphones. Areas of research were usability, readability and energy saving. A literature review of the body of data on the subject was reviewed and the result was put in a list of guidelines. The guidelines were used to compare the desktop version versus the smartphone version on 5 frequently visited websites.    The result was summarized with a score for each website and their respective solution for displaying components on small screens was noted. A prototype website was constructed in two versions: one responsive and one unresponsive. The prototype website’s different versions were then tested by a group of testers. The result of the tests concluded that the guidelines raised user satisfaction and readability. Sufficient energy saving metrics could not be extracted in the way design and usability was tested and had to be excluded from the testing.    The list of guidelines showed that there are solutions for solving readability, usability issues  and energy-saving issues on smartphones. The testing concluded that there was an increase in text readability and usability of the website when the guidelines were implemented. Further testing of energy saving must be conducted to test the validity of the remaining untested  guidelines.

The Internet is gradually expanding to many new devices, in addition to its original native environment that was the Personal Computer. This wave started with mobile devices and as we enter the Internet of Things era, connectivity is possible from cars to light switches. One of the first devices, to follow mobiles, is the Television. Connectivity and two-way interaction on the TV device has in fact started even in the first days of the medium, but had failed to make it widely available, due to technological limitations of the past. Now, this has changed, with the Smart TV devices that can utilize the fast internet connections that are available in most developed countries. However, even though the technology and devices are now widely available there are still challenges in order to make the vast Internet and web content available in the Smart TVs. These challenges, have a familiar resemblance to what happened a few years ago, when internet connectivity was introduced on the mobile phone. Although, it was "feasible" to access any webpage from your mobile device, the experience for the user was often very frustrating, due to many factors, that derived from the fact that the web was designed for large screens and mice of the desktop computers, not the small touch screens and limited hardware of the phone. Nonetheless, these obstacles were successfully overcome, by introducing techniques and methodologies (e.g. Responsive Web Design) to make the web more mobile-friendly and also work from the manufacturers to improve their devices to this direction as well. The success of these actions is now evident, since the access to the web from mobile devices has surpassed the PC, and it is now a standard practice for every new website to be mobile-friendly. In this research work, we will attempt to do one very significant step towards this direction for the Smart TV. In other words, to discover what has to be done to make the web more TV-friendly. To do this, we explore many different TV devices from several manufacturers and see their similarities and differences. We explore numerous user studies and surveys to discover what is the problem in the Web experience on the TV, so that we can propose solutions to make web content TV-friendly. Based on these findings, we design prototypes and put them to the test on different devices and userevaluation. Finally, we propose a set of guidelines, that web designers can apply on their websites to make them TV-friendly, in the hope to introduce the first step towards a friendlier internet era for the TV.

Designing for user experience is central to good web design, particularly in e-commerce settings. However, the relevant dimensions and processes of designing for user experience have been variously defined. This project develops an approach to web design that defines the key dimensions of user experience, including interactivity, participation, and flow, and web site design of the user experience. The idea of Interactive User Experience Design is advanced as a model for designing from the perspective of user experience. The project reviews relevant dimensions of user experience, proposes a model integrating key design dimensions of this experience, surveys design literate university students on effective online experiences, and develops a prototype for a hypothetical commercial web site that incorporates elements of co-creation and identity play. This practice-based project contributes a new proposal for web-based design and new knowledge in the form of an approach to user experience design.

This thesis discusses and proposes a design for a new kind of web-based interface for the display of historical interpretation. The design, specifically for the interpretation of the now-demolished Texas Confederate Home for Men in Austin, Texas, uses this site as a case study to explore how original historical research can combine with and inform the design of a hypothetical open and dynamic on-line database of historic properties. The first half discusses the history of the Home's development, highlighting its significance as a relic of 19th century reform movements and social utopianism, while exploring how this relates to its physical isolation from the surrounding urban context. The second half discusses the scope of web-based historical interpretation and some conclusions about the limitations of current solutions. This chapter then discusses and proposes a series of web-based interactive diagrams illustrating the significance of the site's history identified in the previous chapter. The design attempts to bridge two competing desires in historical interpretation: the desire for rigorous yet static curated interpretation and the desire for an open non-curated data management system. / text

The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly, this research aims to investigate whether the design preferences of bloggers in selected countries from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by national culture traits. The investigation involves two categories of blogs selected within a country where the bloggers share similar attributes such as language or geographical location. Secondly, simultaneously, this research intends to discover the possibility of the impact of group level influence on design preferences of bloggers who are linked together in a network through bloggers’ linkage or blogrolls. To achieve the said purposes, observations on both the global and local blogs of six selected countries are conducted using the content analysis method. This method allows this research to observe web pages and rate design preferences of bloggers via a coding system, similar to the method used to analyse documents or manuscripts to find common themes or keywords. A total of 612 blogs (306 global and 306 local) are observed for a period of nine months to identify cultural traits on design behaviour based on national culture indicators chosen from prominent literatures. To prevent a systematic error, an independent second observer was appointed and the results obtained are compared using a statistical methodology. In addition, translators were also engaged to verify that the translations are of a correct meaning and comprehension since blogs use various national languages on their web pages. The data were statistically tested using SPSS engaging in statistical analysis of frequency table, Cross-Tabulation and cluster analyses and MANOVA. Results shown that design preferences between both the global and local blogs in each country, has significant differences in most of the design indicators chosen. The findings indicate that the national culture influence on design preferences in linked networks of blogs is weakening indicating another type of influence might be in existence. The results also provide evidence that blogs in linked networks are statistically significant as a cluster or a group by themselves and are independent from one cluster to another. The research, however, studies only six countries from six different cultural dimensions. The inclusion of other countries, similar to or different from the countries under investigation, would be an added advantage. Furthermore, the use of only a single type of global blog provider (blogspot.com) in this research could be extended to other global blog providers such as wordpress.com to give fairer coverage of major and popular global blogs as well as providing a wider generalisation effect of the research findings.

This research makes a case for treating an electronic commerce web site as a social actor and argues that LT-enabled support for personalization systems and virtual communities has a significant impact on the perceived communication characteristics of a web site. This research studied the impact of two communication characteristics - adaptiveness and connectivity of a web site. Adaptiveness indicates the extent to which a web site adapts itself to support the needs of its customers whereas connectivity refers to the ability of a web site to link potential customers with other visitors. Further, synthesizing research from communication, media choice and technology adoption literatures, this thesis proposes social presence as the experiential construct and perceived usefulness as the utilitarian construct that will mediate the relationship between communication characteristics of a medium and customer loyalty. A survey and a laboratory experiment were conducted to test the linkages proposed above. The survey showed that while adaptiveness impacted on both social presence and perceived usefulness, connectivity had an impact only on social presence and an insignificant impact on perceived usefulness. Social presence did not influence perceived usefulness while both social presence and perceived usefulness had a significant impact on customer loyalty. By filtering Amazon.com real-time, the lab experiment was conducted to specifically study the causal impact of a web site's support for personalization and virtual communities. Support for personalization had a strong impact on adaptiveness, whereas support for consumer reviews had strong effect on connectivity. Interestingly, support for personalization had a weaker, but significant effect on connectivity and support for consumer reviews had a similar effect on adaptiveness. Data from the experiment was also analyzed using mediation analyses as well as partial least square analysis to show that the general pattern of results observed were consistent across methods thus improving the confidence in the research model proposed. This research by proposing social presence as a crucial experiential predictor of customer loyalty has addressed an important gap that exists in our current understanding of web users' behavior. It also makes a key contribution by empirically showing that a web site's support for IT-enabled personalization and virtual communities do have a significant impact not only on the perceived communication characteristics, but also on customer loyalty through social presence and perceived usefulness.

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The orders of linkages that stabilise evolving media worlds are far from obvious. Often undertaken in media ‘laboratories’, the collaborative processes which combine a range of disciplines to develop media worlds are also far from straightforward. Enablers and constraints are as likely to be non-human as they are the people associated with the project. Plugs, wires, switches, protocols and standards - things whose detail can be mind numbingly boring - all have to be worked into effective and stable sets of associations. This thesis describes two knowledge pathways that track through such a project. The first describes the development of a prototype for a website, imagined as a portal for a range of interests around children and media in New Zealand/Aoteoroa. As media worlds are continually being reconfigured and as data circulates across increasingly linked access technologies, many non-government organisations are migrating their work to ‘the web’. ‘The Media Clearinghouse’ project was one of these. Latour’s analytical concept of immutable mobiles provides a way to make sense of some of the work observed whilst his direction to ‘simply follow’ worlds of interest provided the methodological challenge. The second pathway, traces the bibliographic threads of literatures that come from the descriptive genres of Science Technology Studies (STS). Significant amongst these are Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker who have elaborated the concept of boundary objects and infrastructures. Star and Griesemer’s seminal description of the Museum of Invertebrate Zoology is compared with a description of an early laboratory by Bruno Latour. These and other writers elaborate on methods that offer ways to render visible the messy, chaotic performances of design and invention. They follow inscriptions - tables, lists, maps, sketches and so on. These things work between the micro and the macro and enable very huge terrains to be assembled in small, ordered spaces. The thesis assembles a list of methods that have some utility for following and describing web design work and perhaps, other information worlds. Having followed and described this writer’s work through the invention of the prototype it is argued that a combinative method has successfully enabled a description that moves in and out of a new information ‘laboratory’.

Mångfalden av enheter för webbanvändning ökar, men det finns fortfarande webbplatser som utvecklas med PC:s som enda prioritet. Responsiv webbdesign erbjuder nya möjligheter till webbutveckling eftersom en responsiv webbplats är anpassad till samtliga enheter på marknaden. Området har förvisso fått stort genomslag, men det är fortfarande nytt och relativt outforskat. Det finns också endel utmaningar med responsiv webbdesign som kan vara svåra att bemöta. Uppsatsen kartlägger utmaningar som lyfts fram i vetenskaplig litteratur, och bekräftar eller dementerar samt kompletterar kartlagda utmaningar genom enempirisk studie. I uppsatsens slutsats introduceras ett ramverk med utmaningar inom responsiv webbdesign. / The variety of devices for web use increases, but some web sites are still being developed with PC:s as their only priority. Responsive web design is a way of developing web sites for all devices on the market, and therefore creating new opportunities for web development. The area is still new and relatively unexplored, and there are challenges that can be difficult to address. The thesis maps out challenges found in scientific literature, and confirmes or denies and supplements identified challenges through an empirical study. The thesis concludes with an introduction to a framework with challenges in responsive webdesign.