SOHU observation 2

Jakob's Rules – PDF Files

There are no PDF files applied in Sohu. It isn’t a result of one reason.

First of all, Sohu is a commercial website providing information, but not an academic reading website with academic articles, or websites of universities. There is no room for PDF files, to some extent.

In another way, PDF files are not as popular in China as in developed countries.

Sohu has Reading channel, where there are serial and finished novels. People are accustomed to read novels online, chapter by chapter, one chapter one page. Certainly you can download finished novels in the form of e-books. An e-book is usually text file, html file, or exe file produced by certain software.

Even if you search the internet for essays written in Chinese-simple, number of Microsoft word files will be much more than PDF files. But for Chinese-traditional and English essays, PDF are mainstream format.

Jakob's Rules - Anything looks like ads

Sohu has pop-up ads as well as flash ads almost in all pages. But what seems good is ads look like ads, picture news looks like news, flash games look like games. That means people will not be confused with animations or flashes’ design, such as shape or position.

Ads at Sohu are either at the top of a page, or at the bottom, or at the very both sides which follow you when you scroll up and down.

Jakob's Rules – Design conventions

In my opinion, most Chinese websites look the same. And Sohu is a comprehensive expression of the design conventions.

For instance, email logging in box at the very top of homepage, one link a new window, dense list of news titles, flash ads, flash picture news, latest news displays in the form of rolling, white background with blue or black characters, each channel with a same template, WMV format videos, font size 12 Song typeface - which is standard typeface of Chinese - as default, highlight the hottest news with different color and larger font size, etc.

Jakob's Rules – Answer users’ questions

Things like in London I will go to BBC website every weekday morning after getting up to see what’s the latest news, in China when I access to Internet I will go to Sohu first. Some journalism organizations ask for employees set up Sohu as default page of browser.

Founder of Sohu behaves more like a star rather than merely a rational business man. He often attends charity dinner parties, movie or music awarding ceremonies, and social public good activities, etc.

Sohu is undoubtedly one of the most successful website in China.

The reasons are simple – Sohu offers a satisfactory variety of what people need. Users could get what they expect to almost all the time.