Local Websites as the New Existence of Traditional Local Cultures in the Virtual Space: An Overview on the Local Websites of Turkey

With its original traditions and values dating back to hundreds of years in seven different regions, Turkey distinguishes by its own cosmopolite culture from the others. The local sites of the regions also differ by their aspects reflecting the old culture at both the content and the design level with original tools like "virtual graveyard visit, condolence function etc." Benefiting from the Internet technologies creatively and pragmatically, the sites actually enable the citizens (townsman) who live geographically apart to share the traditions and values of their culture. In other words, by providing the familiar cultural experience on the web, the sites enable a kind of virtual access to hometown. Being a former step of a larger study, this study aims to investigate qualitatively this new existence of the local cultures on the Internet by focusing on the content and design aspects of the sites involved.