Keeping your global gateway from getting in the way
Recently, I went on the Web in search of a bike rack for my car. Because I knew nothing about bike racks, I spent a great deal of time on the sites of two major manufacturers: Thule and Yakima. While jumping back and forth between Thule and Yakima comparing models and prices and more prices, I grew painfully familiar with the their introductory "splash" Web pages.
Both Thule and Yakima use splash pages, although the the pages serve different purposes. In the case of Thule, the initial page is a "global gateway," which allows users to select their country or language (or both) before entering the site. Yakima's splash page is an animated introduction to the company, which I suspect most users click through as quickly as possible. While Thule's splash page is largely utilitarian and Yakima's is largely useless, to the visitor who must click through these pages every time he or she visits, both pages can grow equally tiresome.
The Thule
global gateway.
Yakima doesn't
offer a global gateway.
Cookies to
the rescue
Cookies are small data files that are stored on the user's computer;
they allow a company to serve more customized content to users,
or track user behavior, or a bit of both. In the case of splash
introductory pages, cookies can be used to prevent users from having
to click through the same splash page more than once. In the case
of the Thule site, a cookie can be particularly useful, as it can
take the user specifically to that user's localized Web site.
The FedEx
locale cookie
FedEx also uses a global gateway, included below. But FedEx uses
a cookie to record your country selection so you don't have to see
this gateway when you revisit the Web site.
The FedEx
Global Gateway. Thanks to cookies, once you make your country selection
you may never see this page again.
The FedEx
cookie, up close
Now what exactly does a cookie look like? Here is the cookie
that is recorded on a Web user's computer after having selected
Germany. Notice the use of "de," which is the country
code for Germany (short for Deutschland).
cc /de/ fedex.com/ 0 546656256 29757114 3855345472 29485468
This cookie will tell FedEx to take you directly to the Germany home page when you return to the Web site. Should you return to the Germany site and wish to visit another country, FedEx also includes a "Global Home" link that takes you to the gateway so you can make another selection. Cookies are admittedly a flawed solution, as many Web users disable them on their browsers. Yet cookies are the best solution we have right now to direct users to their localized Web sites as quickly as possible.
The global
gateway evolution
Companies are widely (and wisely) scaling back on their use of introductory
splash pages. In their place we're seeing an increase in the use
of global gateway splash pages. While the global gateway is clearly
a big improvement in global usability, don't forget the cookies.
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