In this paper, we study the relevance of Hall and Hofstede’s
works to the web design beyond traditional domain areas
like e-commerce, and advertising. Existing theories explain
how design may be affected by cultural differences, and we
explore how those differences can be seen in the
government website design across Brazil, Russia, India,
China, and US. We describe our findings confirming that
differences exist, more so between China and US than the
rest, and point out where cultural theories fail to explain the
results, in particular for Brazil, Russia and India and finally,
focus more on the differences between China and US.