Are there any well designed Thai language websites?

[ThaiNotes]

I wasn't sure whether to post this under Thai language or Internet, but I'm hoping I'll get a better response here.

The Thai language websites I visit are all (without exception) poorly designed, and often broken. For example:

• truevisions.com - the TV guide didn't work for years, and now, though it works, it only covers terrestrial channels
• pantip.com - purple text on a purple background
• bloggang.com - ugly blogs customised by using raw HTML/CSS
• immigration.go.th - very amateurish design (particularly the animated graphics/links on the left), and parts of it (the appointment booking system) only work in Internet Explorer
• rirs3.royin.go.th/dictionary.asp (the Royal Institute Dictionary) - a one line change would make this site work 1000% better (by including the page encoding in the HTML) - now when many people visit it they are presented with gibberish and manually have to change the browser's page encoding.

Generally speaking, there's an over-reliance on Flash (meaning that content isn't being indexed by the search engines), far too much in the way of movement (animated .gifs, rotating banners), uninspiring fonts, and overlong pages requiring one to page down again, and again, and again.

There are a lot of gateway pages using large Flash images with no HTML link to the content meaning that the entire site is potentially not indexed. A particularly horrible gateway page at the moment is with tescolotus.com which includes loud football chanting. In the Occident website designers dropped gateway pages as a bad idea years ago.

Where an English language version is "provided", often a lot of the content provided in the form of graphics with Thai text with no translated graphic (e.g. tescolotus.com, bigc.co.th) and sometimes it simply isn't there at all.

Interestingly, a number of very popular sites have adopted a similar style: very long pages full of tiled images with subtitles. For example, sanook.com, teenee.com, truelife.com, siamsport.com, kapook.com.

I find the situation quite difficult to understand. Are Thai people not visually literate (which is hard for me to believe), or do the designs actually appeal to them? Or is it that design is irrelevant, and they only care about content? Do the owners not care that the sites don't work properly, or is it that their IT experts lack the skills to produce properly working sites?

The problems are so pervasive that I'm led to ask: is there even a single, well-designed, Thai-produced, Thai language website out there? If so, I'd love to see it. Please post a link.

[kriswillems]

There's no Thai word for minimalism.

[Taunusianer]

There's no Thai word for minimalism.

Sometimes they start to minimize (one example is the new website from Thairath (http://www.thairath.co.th/), But this is a good example, that this can also worsen the quality.

But about pantip I will not complain. It's currently my favorit. But in general I agree with OP. One reason I prefer to read facebook sites now. Picture and text, I don't need more.

[ThaiNotes]

There's no Thai word for minimalism.

Good point. I guess it's rather like the way that rural restaurants seem to acquire more and more fairly lights as the months and years pass on. And benjarong has nothing of the restrained aesthetic of Japanese ceramics. In Thailand it seems less is never more.

Something else that occurs to me is that probably the majority of Thai web users accesses sites through mobile devices. Swiping up and down a long single page may be more convenient than clicking on links. (That's conjecture on my part. I don't access the Internet through my 'phone.)

[kriswillems]

The layout of newspapers and websites it probably related to culture.

The amount of banners and advertisement is related to the business model.

Actually, I know some Thai interior architects that make very nice designs.

Thai art is also special, and at silpakorn you can find students that really make nice art.

But as always, the style is very different from European/American art.

What is more worrying to me than the fact that Thailand is not perfect in website development, is that very little new technology is invented in Thailand.

There is very little investment in research.

Agriculture related inventions/technology/research seems to be only exception.

Being close to Singapore, a little more investment in computer science would not be bad.

Edited June 18, 2014 by kriswillems

[katana]

For a number of years Thairath used to actually have quite a good website with everything clearly laid out and functional.

Recently they decided to have a style change and upgrade it which resulted in breaking it. The links to the different sections at the top of their homepage overlap, making them hard to read and navigate. The useful ข่าวทั่วไทย section all but disappeared. They bought in some strange Thai font that was hard to read and decipher. This went on for a couple of months, but just in the last few days they have made some improvements but it's still not back to where it was.

[mojorison]

**bump**

 

NO... (The only page that ever works properly is the  "enter" page.)