ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the United Kingdom (UK) small business sector, but it is envisaged that its outcomes will have wider application to the small business communities of other countries. It presents the staged approach to multilingual and multicultural web site development. The chapter describes that reviews was undertaken of literature on designing web sites for international marketing purposes, with a particular focus on literature regarding the designing and tailoring of web sites to the linguistic and cultural needs of overseas site visitors. It explores an investigation of UK Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to determine the level of uptake by small businesses of the design guidelines identified in the literature. The findings of the questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews conducted in the chapter indicated that very few SMEs were following the linguistic and cultural design guidelines. The chapter involves the evaluation and validation of the proposed staged approach among a number of UK small businesses.