All web designers understand the need to create visually appealing, easily navigable sites. The design and layout of their sites are the cornerstones of any successful online portal. But the very nature of a website means that it’s instantly accessible by billions of people across the globe, spanning countless languages, cultures and tastes.

For this reason, web developers should be looking beyond the immediate aesthetics and consider how they can build a website that’s easily adaptable to other languages and cultures.

Text

Whilst design and layout is what first draws traffic in initially, it’s content that ultimately keeps visitors coming back. It can be easy to solely think ‘English, English, English’ in terms of language, but the simple truth is three quarters of the world’s population speak no English. Not even to basic conversational level.

If the purpose of a website is to make money, then businesses need to talk to clients in their own language. But the website translation process is made far easier if the pages were developed originally in Unicode, which caters for over 90 different scripts and has a repertoire of over 100,000 characters. So the German ‘Eszett’ symbol (ß), for example, can be replicated with ease.

Unicode has been adopted by the likes of Oracle, IBM, Apple and Microsoft, whilst all the commonly used operating systems and browsers support it too. Furthermore, standard web design tools such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front page facilitate Unicode web page design.

So it’s best to use Unicode if a site is to be targeted at any non-English language audiences.

Color symbolism

Your choice of colors should also reflect your intended international target audience. For example, ‘black’ generally signifies ‘death’ in western cultures, but in many eastern cultures, white is the color for this. Similarly, red can mean ‘danger’ or ‘love’ in western cultures, whilst it can represent ‘purity’ in India or a cause for ‘celebration’ in China, or even ‘good luck’.

There are many examples of how different colors can mean different things in different cultures. And whatever you do, don’t include an image of a green hat on your site if you’re targeting customers in China…as that means that a man’s wife has been unfaithful!

Simply put, carefully consider your color scheme from the start to avoid having to completely change your design later on.

Content

Obviously, not many people will visit your carefully constructed website for the design alone. Content most certainly is king when it comes to successful websites – you must offer genuinely useful content for your global markets…not only in their native tongue, but in their native dialect too.

Adapting your website text for global markets requires a two-fold process: localization and then optimization.

The localization facet means you need a qualified native-language translator for each of your target countries. And remember, language dialects can vary considerably between regions.

For example, many words mean different things in French (France) and Swiss/Belgian French. ‘Lunch’ is déjeuner in France, but dîner in Switzerland and Belgium. And in France, dîner is the word for ‘evening meal’. Coche in Spain is the word for a ‘car’, but in most Latin American regions, it means a baby-stroller. Moreover, a baby-stroller won’t be a familiar term to UK readers: they’ll be more likely to use a ‘pushchair’ or ‘buggy’.

Website translation is made a whole lot easier if you stick to standard text and use minimal amounts of Flash content. This is because it’s difficult to edit, copy and perform word-counts on Flash files, processes that are central to the translation process. Moreover, the old adage that text is the food of search engines is true: Google can’t detect words embedded in Flash, meaning it’s harder to optimize to rank highly on search engines.

Speaking of search engine optimization (SEO), you shouldn’t translate your keywords and phrases directly from English. Locally, people might not use the direct translation – they may use abbreviations, acronyms or synonyms.

The properly researched search terms should then be incorporated into your translated website, preferably on a dedicated ‘in-country’ domain. For example, http://www.mywebsite.fr, for France, rather than http://fr.mywebsite.com – Google uses the domain as part of its search algorithm to determine where your site should rank on its in-country search engine, in this case www.google.fr.

Navigation

It goes without saying that navigation should be a key consideration in any website’s layout. But with right-to-left languages (RTL) such as Arabic, where you put your main navigation bar may have to differ from your English language website.

It’s not a disaster if you simply shift the menu over to the other side of the page, but for ease – and consistency – some designers may prefer to use a horizontal bar instead.

If your website is to be replicated in a number of different languages, you have a couple of options for how users access their native language pages. You can create a simple entrance page, where visitors select the language of the site, which will of course include the positioning of the navigation and scroll bars. Or, you can simply use English as default, and have clearly labeled options for switching to other languages at the top.

These are just a few of the things you should consider when building a website. Of course, if the main aim of developing your site or blog doesn’t involve making money, then you’ll probably get by just fine in English.

But given that anyone from Nebraska to Nairobi could be accessing your site, it certainly pays to be prepared should you wish to adapt you site at some point in the future.

About the author

Christian Arno launched translation company and website localization specialists Lingo24 in 2001. With operations across four continents and clients in over sixty countries, Lingo24 had a turnover of $6.1m USD in 2009.