Japanese Web Design - 19 Beautiful Websites from Japan

Konichiwa, Habr! In the eyes of many people, Japan is a land of tranquility, Zen gardens, serene temples and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and modern Japanese architecture, books and magazines are the envy of designers around the world. However, for some reason, virtually none of these skills have transferred to digital products, particularly websites, most of which look like they came out circa 1998.

Theories about why this is so are numerous, and today, on the eve of the start of the “Profession of a Web Developer” course, we will try to develop some of the most common theories in this post.

Take a look at the most popular sites in Japan and this is what you can see (see Goo, Rakuten, Yomiuri, NicoNico, OKWave, @cosme, and others):

• Dense, closely packed text.
• Tiny, low quality images.
• More columns than you can count.
• Bright flashing colors and banners.
• An overabundance of outdated technologies such as Flash.

Why is everything exactly like this?

Yahoo Japan

Statistics show that this is the search engine preferred by the majority of Japanese users - about 53%. Essentially, this is just an adapted version of the global search engine. The only significant difference is that several alphabets are used for queries: romaji (writing Japanese words in Latin), as well as Kanji, Hiragana and Katagana characters.

Japanese search engines in Russia

As absurd as it may sound, some users actually try to find something for such a request. In fact, such search engines do not exist, because that’s why they are Japanese, to search for information outside the Russian segment of the Internet.

Among the indigenous population of the Land of the Rising Sun, a very small percentage speaks Russian, at least at an elementary level. The same people who move to Japan sometimes need to find something in their native language because their goal is to fully integrate into the new society. But even if such a need arises, it is enough to change the language in the settings or go to the Russian version of the search engine.

Google Japan

The Japanese Google (search engine) looks the same as the one we are used to, except that all links are written in hieroglyphs. There are no differences in terms of interface and functionality: all basic services are available, including search by images and news. The situation here is the same as in Yahoo: you need to take into account that users publish materials written using different alphabets. However, the Japanese Google (search engine) has one more feature: since the inhabitants of the country love long texts, if you want to watch videos or diagrams, it is better to immediately indicate this.

Japan - Top 10 Best Website Hosting, July 2021

List of available plans from the best hosting provider in each category. They mainly offer competitive low-cost services and cheap prices for servers (sometimes including free plans/free domain registration) and SSD/SAS hard drives. If you are looking for WordPress/Drupal/Joomla/ Magento / Wiki / PhpBB / TYPO3

powerful applications (run by a business or enterprise), you will have to manually check the plans of the best web hosting companies. Some of them may have their own data center services (using renewable energy, running on green energy) by renting racks , are ICANN or the official domain registrars for a specific country extension.
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Goo

But here's something more interesting. This service is worth paying attention to those who are looking for native Japanese search engines. Goo is ideal for searching information resources, blogs and portals. Like Yandex, the home page has several sections: news, weather, discounts in stores, popular blog posts, sports results, mail, and even recommended vacancies.

Infoseek Japan

Now Infoseek is practically not used anywhere except Australia, Poland and Japan itself. This service is much more complex than other Japanese search engines - it can act as a personal informant, notifying you about news on selected topics. The menu has a Smart Info item - it contains links to useful reference resources (dictionaries, business directories, phone books, etc.). Infoseek has a few more tricks. The first is a large multimedia catalog designed to search for pictures and audio recordings. The second is the Sites by Subject section, where you can view popular sites from 16 different categories.

Cultural differences

Risk Avoidance – Japanese culture generally discourages taking risks or standing out from the crowd. Once a precedent is set for the behavior or appearance of something, everyone follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution. Even Japanese subcultures follow their own fashions and rules.

Consumer Behavior - The Japanese demand high guarantees, this requirement is met through long descriptions and technical specifications. When making a purchasing decision, they don't hesitate before a catchy headline or a beautiful picture. The proverb “less is more” doesn’t quite apply here.

- Instead of viewing the Internet as a tool for inclusion, Japanese companies often look at the Internet as just another advertising platform to get the word out about a product as loudly as possible. Websites are ultimately the maximum concentration of information in the smallest space, akin to a brochure, rather than an interactive tool.

Urban landscape - Take a walk through one of Tokyo's downtown areas, such as Shibuya, and you'll be constantly bombarded with bright neon advertising, noisy pachinko parlors (arcade game parlors), crowds of rowdy mercenaries or schoolchildren. The same chaotic efficiency of the streets seems to have carried over to the web. Additionally, since physical space is expensive in Japan, it is not wasted, and the same goes for white space on a web page.

Web Jobs - Look at any job site in Japan and you'll still see advertisements for roles such as "web master" and "web administrator", dating back to the days when a company would hire a single IT guy to write code by hand and launch the entire website - many people still do this. On the other hand, creative people want creative freedom, which they are unlikely to find in a large Japanese corporation, so they go elsewhere.

Biglobe

At Biglobe, the emphasis is on finding relevant news. Right on the start page there is a calendar for the current month with information about past and upcoming events. And in a separate block you can see a list of the hottest requests for today. The wide settings for search parameters are also impressive: we can say that Biglobe is the only Japanese search engine in Russian. You can clearly define the search area by indicating the desired domain zones, language, and publication period of the materials.

What you shouldn't expect from the Japanese segment of the network

Firstly, Japanese search engines are not designed to search for pirated content. More precisely, in the Land of the Rising Sun such a concept is not widespread, just like torrents. Therefore, if some paid content was not found free for download on the RuNet, it is useless to search for it on the Japanese network.

Secondly, you won’t be able to watch materials banned in Russia either, and the tightened legislation is not in favor of this option. But, most likely, the content will be blocked by the provider itself unless the user uses various tricks. Unless, unlike the Russian one, the Japanese search engine will still find these materials and display a list of sites on the page, but it will hardly be possible to visit them.

And thirdly, in order to search for something in this segment of the Internet, it is advisable to know the language of the Land of the Rising Sun at a decent level. No translator can help you accurately reproduce a complex phrase, and given the huge number of meanings of the same word, you may find something completely different from what the user himself wanted. If you wish, of course, you should try to enter a query in English, but even this way you won’t be able to find everything.

Thus, Japanese search engines are only suitable for finding certain information. With their help, you can order something from a site that is not relevant for the Russian-speaking segment, see a few more famous television shows and other funny video content. And of course, read news from primary sources, learn about the history of the country, or simply surf sites to satisfy your interest.

Source

Excite

As you have already noticed, Japanese search engines almost always have additional functions not directly related to search. The Excite service is no exception. So, the Excite Pal service is very interesting - a real-time communication system. In addition, the search engine has a very powerful directory of sites containing more than 80,000 hand-selected links with short comments. According to some experts, Excite provides the most relevant results of all foreign search engines.