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If your organization is serious about entering the Chinese market, you’ll need a website dedicated to your Chinese audience. The China digital ecosystem is unique on many levels: its regulations, its users’ habits and behaviors and its actors. Choosing the right strategy when creating a website for China can save your organization time, money, and unrealistic expectations, while leveraging your existing assets and optimizing the user experience of your Chinese audience. Flow has been helping clients with their China digital solutions since 2007 and we would like to share our expertise with you.
Because the China digital ecosystem is so different from the rest of the world, It might seem confusing at first. In reality, the rules are very clear.
To host a website in China:
If you can’t comply with all these requirements, the second best option is to host your website overseas, as close as possible, (ie: Hong Kong), and optimize the website so that it loads fast and properly from within China.
Flow can help you to figure out which option fits your profile best, and help with selecting and setting up your website hosting, managing your domain and supporting you with the ICP license application process.
Having a high quality Chinese translation and localisation is critical. It might be tempting to just get a translation for the international version of the site. While this is perfectly fine for technical information, literal translation of branded content is often dry and soulless, and does not reflect the identity of your brand.
Additionally, the Chinese language is complicated with mistranslations implying different meanings entirely. Working with a professional Chinese copywriter to give your Chinese content a unique voice is also a way to demonstrate your dedication to the Chinese market. Finally, website content is regulated and some marketing formulations perfectly acceptable outside China are illegal in China. To avoid your website being taken down, make sure your Chinese content comply with the latest Chinese regulations.
Flow can help you with sourcing the right translation company, the right Chinese copywriter, or assess if your content is China ready.
As with content, adapting your website design to the Chinese audience can go a long way. Just replacing English characters with Chinese characters usually looks wrong, inelegant. Working with a Chinese designer to adjust the website layouts will bring out your marketing messages in Chinese as it was intended. It is also important to select pictures and key visuals that resonate with your Chinese audience.
Flow has been designing and localizing websites for China since 2007. We can help you create or adjust your website design to optimize the user experience for your Chinese audience.
Web technologies in China are the same as outside China. However a lot of third-party services not hosted in China (like Youtube, Google Maps, etc) are not accessible from China, causing a website to load very slowly and malfunction. Before deploying a website for China, it is important to identify which services are blocked, and replace these services with Chinese alternatives (Like Tencent Videos, Baidu maps, WeChat share feature).
Is your website developed with Wordpress? Perfect. Flow development team has extensive experience with localizing Wordpress websites for China. We can work with your global web team to either localize your existing website assets, or develop a new website for China.
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing in China share the same principles as outside China. Yet, the search engines and the tools are different: (Baidu, Sogou, Baidu, Baidu Tongji, Baidu webmaster tools).
Our search engine optimisation team can help you with keyword research, Chinese organic search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing campaigns to bring your website on the China website search map.
Digital Lead | SPT Labtech
Sales Manager at | Kinetico
FlowBeijing