The Ritz-Carlton website originally offered a reduced set of translated core pages for their Chinese and Japanese customers. As The Ritz-Carlton’s business expanded rapidly in Asia, they made a strategic decision to expand the offering of in-language pages to better serve this growth market. The English version of the site had recently been updated with a stunning new visual design; for cohesiveness, Chinese and Japanese were to use this design as well, with accommodations made for language and cultural nuances.
As part of our on-going work with The Ritz-Carlton, Rare Medium worked closely with Ritz-Carlton’s in-country design firm to adapt the visual design for Chinese and Japanese. Parallel to that effort, an extensive content audit was performed, which identified the differences among the English, Japanese, and Chinese content and the resolution of each item. This audit served as the roadmap for development.
An accelerated timeframe precluded a server-side technical approach to this work. Instead, Rare Medium used Cascading Style Sheets to apply custom style selectors, which transformed the presentation layer according to language and specific hotel. Also, because of the timeframe, we had to migrate existing content while sharing common ASP.net source pages, while allowing for the distinctive shifts in style and font presentation described above.
