Byte Level Research Announces Best Global Web Sites of 2011

The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card identifies best practices, emerging trends, and the hottest languages on the Internet

Now in its seventh edition, The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card has played an important role in highlighting the very best multilingual web sites as well as helping other web sites get better.

This year, the report rated the web sites of 250 companies across 25 industry categories, analyzing elements such as languages, global navigation, global consistency, and localization. The top 25 global web sites are as follows:

Facebook emerges as number one, unseating Google

Google, which has held the number one spot for years, was unseated by Facebook this year. Facebook’s recent innovations (multilingual social plugins, improved global gateway, multilingual user profiles) gave it the edge.

Companies like Cisco, 3M, Philips, and NIVEA have become regular faces in the top 25. But there are some new faces as well. There are five companies new this year to the top 25: Volkswagen, Adobe, Shell, Skype, and DHL.

Although these 25 web sites represent a wide range of industries, they all share a high degree of global consistency and impressive support for languages. They average 58 languages -- which is more than twice the average for all 250 sites reviewed.

"Despite a sluggish global economy, web globalization remains alive and well," said report author John Yunker. "More than 50 of the 250 companies in this report added two or more languages over the past 12 months."

Report Identifies Hottest Languages and Newest Trends

The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card plays a valuable role in helping companies understand emerging and established best practices. Among the many findings included within the 125-page report are:

Average number of languages increases to 23
In 2006, the average number of languages supported was 15. This year, the new baseline for companies going global is 23 languages. Fast-growing languages include Turkish, Hungarian, Indonesian, and Russian.

Global consistency reigns
The global design template is now a widely accepted standard in web globalization. Roughly 70% of all companies studied demonstrate some degree of consistency among country web sites, up from 50% three years ago.

Scoring Methodology

The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card analyzed each web site according to the following five criteria:

• Global Reach (Languages): The web site supports enough languages to reach a wide global audience.
• Global Navigation: Web users can quickly and easily find their localized content, regardless of what language they speak.
• Global Consistency: The web site leverages global templates to support global branding, operational efficiency, and usability.
• Localization: The web site is truly relevant to the user's locale and culture. Products, promotions, and customer support information is all localized.
• Community Localization: Content is sourced and/or translated locally via community and social networking platforms.

About The Web Globalization Report Card

Now in its seventh edition, The 2011 Web Globalization Report Card is the authoritative guide to the state of web globalization.

The 2012 Web Globalization Report Card is 125 pages and published in PDF format.

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About Byte Level Research

Founded in 2000, Byte Level Research pioneered web globalization research and consulting. John Yunker, president and chief analyst of Byte Level Research, is editor of Global by Design, a blog devoted to web globalization best practices.