A multilingual website is a great way to expose your business to new markets without physically moving anywhere. If you're looking to internationalise your business then we can help you - Salt Websites is a recognised leader in website internationalisation. We understand the technologies, languages and cultures. Many can talk, but Salt Websites has the experience and references to back it up - check out some of the high-quality multilingual websites we've built and optimised for search (SEO/SEM) in the case studies section.
Besides their technical prowess, all our staff speak at least two languages, and we have native English, German, Dutch and Spanish speakers on board - so we talk your language, too.
Below is a list of some things which need to be considered when building a multilingual website. Most of these points are expensive and very difficult to implement after the website has been built and put online, and must be considered by a web development firm during the process of planning the site architecture. We hope the list gives some idea of why it is highly advisable to use experienced specialists to build an international website, and also gives some tips to those new to internationalisation ("i18n" in development circles) looking to learn the craft.
A clean, professional, internationalised website needs:
A Design That Accommodates Varying Text Sizes
Every language has a different length. Typically English is quite short compared to other European languages. A menu navigation tab, text area or any page element must expand or contract to fit the size of the text in it, because in every language the size will be different. Nothing can be totally fixed - each element on the screen must be able to expand horizontally or vertically to fit the text otherwise for certain languages it will look silly having a big space and not much text, and other languages the text will spill out of the container element.
A website design must take this into account in order to appear professional.
Separately Managed Design and Content
This is something which websites should do anyway, but for internationalised websites it's a must. One example is if you create a picture with English text in it as a navigation button, then you will need to create a separate picture for every language and then manage all those pictures! This spells nightmare.
Behind the scenes the content, that is the text, needs to be fully separated from the design, that is the colours, pictures, page positioning of items. Using XHTML and CSS correctly is a very good start to satisfying this requirement. When the page is presented to the user, the correct language content and the design are pulled together and appear as one.
Easy Update for Translators
Content changes on a website - it's a simple fact. Translators will need to update their translations for every language. It's integral that translators can log in and make those changes themselves. If every change has to go through the web design firm, it quickly becomes costly. Additionally people working in languages they don't understand are far more likely to make errors.
Each change to the text of the website must create the minimum possible work and cost to implement in all languages.
The Correct Language URL scheme
There are many different options for the addresses of your foreign language pages. Here are some examples of the most common schemes:
- www.company.com, de.company.com, fr.company.com
- www.company.com, www.company.com/de, www.company.com/fr
- www.company.com, www.company.de, www.company.fr
The decisions of which to go for must be made specific to the needs of the particular company based on their relative focus on search engine optimisation, branding, which languages and country groups they're aiming at, and more. It is very important to choose the right scheme because it is critical to usability and search engine marketing.
Localised, Search Engine-Friendly URLs
If you look at the URLs (address of the pages) of this website, you'll see they use the key English words from the article, for example this page has the URL http://www.saltwebsites.com/multilingual-foreign-language. This page has not been translated yet, but if you read the translated pages on our site you will notice that the URLs are not http://www.saltwebsites.com/multilingual-foreign-language-fr or http://www.saltwebsites.com/q?pageid=2938, but rather they use the keywords in the foreign language.
This is more friendly for users, causes your company to really appear local and not just semi-local, and gives your pages a boost in the search engine results pages. A win on all fronts.
Search in Own Language
Normally a user that conducts a search on your website will only want to see results in the language that they understand. Your search should be configured to only return results in the language the user is currently using.
The Bottom Line
Anyone can build some kind of multiple language website. But building professional, cost-effective, functional multilingual websites which bring sales requires specialist skills. For more information, just go ahead and drop us a line.
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