Working on a chinese website

I've recently been charged with creating a stylesheet for a Chinese website. I've had some vague experience with Japanese, but that was several years ago - in the world of the Internet, an age. So the first challenge was to get the chinese characters to display. I had to save the file to a specific unicode format to enable the browser to cope with chinese characters.

In addition to that, I needed to include the meta tag, http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=gb2312". This informs the browser which character set to use in order to render the text for the site.

So all in all something new for me. Of course it made me consider a whole range of cultural differences that could affect web design - the significance of colours, reading direction, conformity to user expectations etc. For this particular project, my input didn't move beyond creating a style that resembled a corporate site and so was pretty cosmetic, but it has piqued my curiosity for non-western website user conventions...