Japanese Websites & Japanese Web Design

We Are The Experts In Japanese Website Design

Zoom Planet is a leading industry expert in Japanese website design.  We create high quality user-focused designing for your organisation, incorporating multiple languages for worldwide attraction. Are you looking to expand into the Japanese market?  We guarantee that your targeted audience is the focal point of  everything we create for you.

Japanese language websites

The English language is always written left to right and then top to bottom. The Japanese language has two styles of writing. The yokogaki style has the Japanese characters from left to right. The tetegaki is the top down style often seen in movies. This style has the characters in column that a red top to bottom and right to left. Early HTML and CSS standards did not support the tetegaki style of writing. The most current version of CSS supports this style, but earlier versions of CSS are still too common for this to be very helpful.

Japanese Website Design & Issues With Language

The important factor when developing websites in Japanese is the server used to develop and host the website. Some servers use default characters to send to a browser. The default characters will overwrite characters that are defined within the page, preventing the Japanese characters from displaying properly.  Finding a server that supports the Japanese characters is important to developing a Japanese language website.

Google is not a dominant search engine in Japan. In Japan, Google only holds between 10 and 30% of search engine market share, while Yahoo holds between 60 and 80%. All other search engines combined hold the remaining sliver of the market.

Domain names in Japan

Japanese domain names are denoted by the.jp extension. This top level domain can help make the website appear more authentic to Japanese speakers, but a.jp domain requires a Japanese mailing address. It is possible to get a subdomain within the top level domain, such as .co.jp for companies, and ne.jp for network providers, kaisha companies that are officially registered in Japan, and non-Japanese Gaikoku Kaisha companies.

Japanese Search Engines

Yahoo in Japan runs on the YST search algorithm, which is very different from Yahoo in the UK or the US. In order for a website to be successful in Japan, content must target the YST algorithm.  Considering the importance of Yahoo in Japan, submitting websites to Yahoo is critical, just as submission to Google in the US or UK. Google submission in Japan is easy, but submission to Yahoo is very slow and may require a fee of ¥50,000 or more for some commercial websites.

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Would you like to translate your website to Japanese?

Zoom Planet offers full translation, design, hosting, and search engine marketing and Japanese and several other languages. We we hire native speakers to translate work for the best results. We understand every aspect of Japanese website design. Contact us using our web enquiry form, or by telephone on 0115 871 4994 , if you would like to discuss how Zoom Planet can help you with your Japanese website design.