Korean Internet Industry has been growing in recent years and more than 80 percent of their households in South Korea are connected with broadband access. Korean Internet users have been found to be more active in their Internet usage and younger than Internet users in the United States. With so much focus point on Korea Web Industry, career path for Korea web designers and programmers seems bright and promising.
When you happened to stumble upon a Korean website which seems pretty much rare, the functionality of the site might just disappoint you. But the hard works and the creativeness of Korean designers should not be discounted simply because of some operational defect.
Discovering A Korean Website
While Korean websites may be hard to navigate around even translate in English, some of the design elements are simply appalling. Though as common as its neighbor across the island, Korean websites make full use of Flash as much as Japan websites. The flash adoption seems to be an ongoing trend in today Asia web design and development. Though their other technologies may be on par with International level, their field in Web design and development certainly has much room for improvement.
Visual Vs Operational
Well, some may argue that Korean web sites are hard to navigate and difficult to use. They seems to take longer time to load, more potential of having errors and generally do not work well in most browsers. The Korean website creators may not mixed well when it comes to global resources like Google or Wikipedia, because Korean users' awareness of or participation in these services is little to none. But some of the website graphical effects and design elements are simply top notched.
Presenting The Most For Their Visitors
Korean websites tend to make an efficient use of space. Korean web users want information to be shown as much as possible. They want to be able to, for instance, scan all of the headlines of the newspaper in just a few seconds, or find the latest and greatest gadget in their online store without much moving the mouse or clicking. The compact design of Korean web sites is ideally suited for this situation.
Flash Is Their Essence
Flash is used to good effect by Korean Web creators to produce cute and approachable character for each site. Without the limitations that HTML has, Korean web designers can make something that is truly unique for each site, and displays the character of both the designers and the web site owner. They have sacrificed standards compliance for attractiveness.
Forget About SEO
The web also works differently in South Korea. Most of their search portals does not crawls web pages automatically, instead they based their search databases on registration and payment from web sites. Hence they do not care much about SEO, less searching for them in Google.
30 Beautiful Korean Websites Design
Here we presents you the ever so hard to find Korean websites that might give you an insight into Korean web designers ideology and creativity.
Conclusion
There may be some other beautiful Korean websites out there which is invisible to search engine and could not reached the masses. What is the use of having the nicest web design but there is no visitors to admire it? If you have seen other inspirational and beautiful Korean website design, share with us in the comment box.
It's cool. Thank you!!!
Awesome designs, Good Sense of Designing. Great colors are used, some designs are challenges. Charlotte Theatre is really good.
Look to the other side is amazing. Thank you for this collection.
Yeah, indeed great layouts, thx for sharing this great collection :) It's true, that SEO is no bug issue there, because Google isnt important there at all.. if you want to look for something, naver.com and daum.net are the sites you have to visit :)
There are two Korean hotsites that I reallyyyy admire:
Movie "The Uninvited"
http://postvisual.com/theuninvited/en/
I think their "way" of doing websites fits perfectly to hotsite projects. These two are very creative and experimental.
Awesome collection, those are really neat to see!
A little while ago I hunted down all the international CSS Galleries I could find. You guys might be interested in checking it out.
http://www.stargraphicdesign.com/index.php/2008/02/international-css-showcases/
Just want to share another inspirational Korean website: Haru illustration: http://haruillust.com/ :)
Oh, WOWW!!
Thank you for compiling these websites!
It's very inspiring for a young and beginner web designer like me! :D
Most of them are sooo colorful ... btw I'm Asian :P
nice collection, thanks for inspire..
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Very cool its nice to see some foreign website designs no one ever seem to show them for inspiration!
Actually there is a gallery site for Korean web design:
http://www.dbcut.com/bbs/index.php
There are a lot of jaw-dropping websites there
Yeah a lot of korean websites require internet explorer to work at their bests...lol but that doesnt matter becaause i think korean people only use ie anyway. And i think the sites load a lott faster in korea than they do here. I admire all the nice designs, but i am a fan of google's simplicity and plain-ness XD
That's why when you use other browsers to view their websites, it tends to have either some sort of layout errors.
Imagine that their IE fever is over and other great browsers invade their technological world, there will be another level of great design coming from them.
maybe because their internet connection is blazingly fast so there is no problem loading flash-based website.
here are what i found
http://www.sejong.ac.kr
http://www.mnet.com
http://www.ufotown.com
I think the best websites that Korea has are the fashion boutique shopping malls not gmarket or the like, they have a rather clean design. It's rather nice to see variety here.
I really appreciate posts, which might be of very useful
On the downside Wilt only won one NBA championship and was a notorious poor free throw shooter.
He may have won more championships if he didn't have to face the great Celtics team of his era almost every year in the playoffs.
Amazing collection of sites... Would like to add one more..
http://www.thekoreaguide.com/ (more of a information site for expats in Korea)
but very elegant and easy to use... and in English.