Going Mobile Behind the Great Firewall

 
China has at least 593 million mobile internet users. This is more internet users than in the whole of the EU – who number around 400 million – and around 17% of the total number of internet users in the world. And most of them are online using mobile devices. Just five years ago, mobile users started to outnumber those only using desktops, and now close to 90% of internet users are going online this way (China Internet Watch). Those who stick to desktop or laptops only to access the internet are a clear minority.
In China, your mobile is important because it’s closely tied to who you are. It’s used for shopping accounts and for social network accounts. Where we would normally expect to choose a username, it’s far more common to use a mobile number to log in. People very often choose to officially link their mobile numbers to their government-issued IDs – their number is more than a way to reach them, but also something that identifies who they are.
 
Load fast; load every time
So for any company wishing to target the Chinese market, making your website accessible on mobile is clearly a must. If you have a site with a responsive design that adapts to mobiles, you may think you’re most of the way there. However, websites in China have not, in general, followed the west’s example and adopted responsive design as a mobile solution. Mobile sites are more often completely separate, and considered the “primary” website.
But there are many more considerations than how the site looks on mobile. Creating a China-focused website obviously needs a .cn domain and full translations. But simply mirroring translated content on a different domain isn’t nearly enough to make a successful website in China.
Today, very few sites have content from only one source. Often there will be videos embedded from Youtube, social plugins from Facebook and Twitter, and – depending on the site – photos from Flickr or presentations from Slideshare. All of these are currently blocked by the ‘great firewall’ in China, and will at the very least slow down access to your site or make it completely inaccessible.
The ‘Great Firewall’, officially known as the ‘Golden Shield’, is a sophisticated internet filtering system that restricts online access in mainland China – Websites have to be licensed and all content has to adhere to Chinese regulations. If you’re in China and want to check your Gmail account or look something up on Wikipedia, these sites won’t load. Similarly, if you’re browsing a website that includes elements from a blocked domain, such as a sidebar showing ‘recent tweets’, this may also block the entire site from view.
All of the content on the site must be accessible in China. Similarly, payment options, advertising, search engine marketing, and social plug-ins should all be chosen with accessibility in mind. But even with all of this, being able to access a site is far from guaranteed. If it takes more than five seconds to load a site, people will simply give up – accessing sites hosted outside China often means load times of up to 60 seconds. A lot of companies use creative ways to show the progress of page loading but there is an even better solution.
 

Cool Bear Hi 2010
At 4%: “Choose Cool Bear Hi. Share your happiness.”
At 22%: “Wear a smiling face every day, and say Hi to everybody.”
At 41%: “Cool Bear is impatient, ‘Why hasn’t anybody taken me home!’”
At 70%: “Book a test-drive appoint. Get your special gift and reward points.”
Source: smashingmagazine.com/
 
 
Navigating cultural differences
But even if you create a site that loads quickly, loads every time, has no blocked or slow-loading content, and is promoted well, the site may not have anything close to the response wanted if it is not designed with Chinese tastes in mind.
To someone used to western websites, visiting a Chinese website can seem disorienting. There are a number of reasons for this – it’s more difficult to use fonts to grab attention in Chinese; people tend to want to click links rather than search because typing in Chinese on an alphabet-based keyboard can be quite a nuisance; and slow internet speeds means that text-heavy sites are preferable to loading lots of separate pages. This makes the minimalistic design of many western websites unappealing.

 
Minimalist sites do however have their place – on mobile. Many brands are making use of single-serving “light apps”, a popular trend in China.
These “light apps” are actually microsites aimed at a mobile audience, often accessed using a QR code. They have a single message, and are designed to be shared across social platforms rather than to sell something directly to the person browsing.
 
 

 
 
 
 
QR codes are everywhere and very different from the ones we are used to here in Europe – Source: visualead.com
 
 
China has 577 million mobile social media users – almost every internet user uses social media – despite Facebook and Twitter being blocked by the Great Firewall. WeChat, Qzone, SinaWeibo, Baidu Tieba, and Renren are all popular, with WeChat the most popular by quite some way. Triggering the desire to share is all about entertainment – quizzes, animations, and games that mean people will want their friends and family to see the app.
Creating a site that will meet users’ expectations takes a lot of time, effort and resources – much more than simply translating what you have and hoping for the best. After allocating these resources and creating a great site or light app that people will share, it’s vital to make sure that your site loads quickly by avoiding blocked elements and using a content delivery network that will ensure availability – otherwise a sixth of the world’s internet users will miss your site.
 

Source: taobao.com
 
Chris Townsley, Sales Director EMEA / CDNETWORKS (UK)