Monday, July 23, 2007

World Wide WoW: East vs West, which WoW sites are better?

Westerners and Easterners, for whatever reason, often have very different sorts of websites, and the World of Warcraft websites for different regions of the world reflect this. The game itself may be the same anywhere in the world, but the people who play it are different, and it's interesting to note some of these differences to see what we can learn from them about the people.

Westerners (Americans and Europeans, to be exact) get a blog-like format, featuring columns and an expansive vertical menu going down the left side. Western WoW pages of various countries tend to be more or less the same, just in different languages.

Easterners (namely Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans), get quite a different experience. One of the first things you notice on the front page is that lots of information on the WoW sites is presented interactively, with images taking up the main space, and words and news items being pushed into the background. Words are kept to a minimum, and are presented in square-like sections, rather than columns, with a friendly flash menu stretching across the top of the page. Their pages all seem tailor-designed for each of the three Asian regions, and no two are exactly alike.

Are westerners getting shafted with lower-quality websites for their World of Warcraft needs? Or are the Easterners' glitzy sites making up for something Westerners may take for granted? Continue reading for a closer look, with a gallery of illustrative screenshots.

all by world of warcraft gold

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