Though most of the world's websites are in English and other languages based on Roman characters, only about half of the Web's users speak English as their primary language.

Next to English and Chinese, Japanese is the most widely used language on the Internet today.
Sheer numbers are only part of the story, though: There may be only 126 million speakers of Japanese, for example, but high penetration of Internet-enabled devices make Japan a coveted e-commerce market.

The crucial issue for developers - and clients - is to conquer markets where literacy and PC and wireless penetration are high.

The combination of high PC ownership and higher levels of adult literacy (in Japan, it's nearly total) is one element driving global Internet growth. So is increasing use of mobile phones and other wireless devices with Internet access, according to Sergey Brin, president and co-founder of search engine service Google.com, which recently introduced Asian language features.

In designing Japanese language web page content, JapaNet takes full advantage of the latest developments in Unicode- the emerging standard for representing international character sets , which now surpasses ASCII and its 256-character limit.

Unicode can handle up to 65,000 characters- enough to map not only Japanese but "theoretically all known alphabet schemes and still have room left over for expansion," according to The Unicode Consortium, Mountain View, Calif. It also works with the current lingua franca of Web design, HTML, and its successor, XML.

With Unicode, there is no radical change in the way Web pages are created, served, and interpreted by browser software. Because it works with HTML, Web designers can specify any of some 35 international scripts to be used in pages.

With a browser supporting Unicode ,all a user would need to display a site in a non-Roman alphabet is the appropriate font set. Unicode works with versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer greater than 4.0, and Microsoft's Global Input Method Editor allows users of Explorer to type Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text into Web forms and e-mails -- even if their PC is not set up to use those character sets normally.

Then there's the e-commerce angle.

Forrester Research says that by 2010, well over half of all online commerce will take place outside the U.S., making globalization a necessity rather than a sideline.

In markets where European languages are not widely read, lacking a local-language website will mean losing sales. Japanese visitors' ability to being able to read pages is only half of the story - visitors must also be able to find and access Japanese-language website information.

JapaNet completes the Japanese web presence project through full Japanese language search engine registration, hosting of websites on Japan-based servers and registration of Japanese language domain names.