14 Mar 2008 02:21:23 | David Bell
If you are living in a country where English isn't the primary
language, then you may like to develop your website to offer
content in the language of your own country. There are millions
of websites on the Internet that are all in English but there
are billions of people on the earth that speak in a different
language and are not familiar with English. However, most of the
Internet users are basically familiar with English and could use
the Internet but there are many subjects that are hard to
understand for those people whom their language is not English.
One example is websites related to pharmaceutics. There are tons
of very difficult to understand phrases in the content. The
other example is educational websites that basically should
provide content in the local language not English. You may have
many clients and business partners that wish to read your sales
copy and product information in their own language. So, having a
website that provides the content in a language rather than
English is necessary for you. Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Dutch,
French and many other languages are examples of common languages
on the Internet.
For you to start a multilingual website, it is vital to consider
some tips before starting to design and develop your websites:
1- The Code Page
The best code page that you should choose for your web pages is
Unicode. Unicode is a kind of numeric presentation of characters
that is two bytes and so can contain up to 65535 characters to
show. There are no currently spoken languages that have more
than 65,535 characters. So, by using Unicode, you are able to
show all characters of your language. 2- Tools For Development
For creating web pages in Unicode format, you should have a tool
to be able to type in your language. One of the tools that are
widely used by web developers is Microsoft Front Page. If this
tool is installed on Windows XP then you have the most powerful
set of software to create Unicode documents. FrontPage is a
WISYWIG tool for creating web pages and you can easily choose
the language of your web page in options of the page and
appropriate HTML tags would be automatically inserted in the
code. 3- Nature of the Language If your language is
Right-To-Left like many of Asian and Middle East languages, for
example, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, you should tune your
operating system to be able to switch from Left-To-Right to
Right-To-Left typing method to be able to type from Right and
from Left. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, you can
configure your system for multiple languages and keyboards, each
of them having different kind of input methods. For example, you
can add Farsi as the second language of your Windows and then
switch from English to Farsi by pressing a combination of keys
and start typing in Farsi. Also switching from RTL to LTR would
be possible by another key combination.
4- Navigation and Design Considerations
Some languages force you to apply some changes in the design and
navigation of your website. For example, if you have a vertical
menu bar, you may put it in the left of your pages for English
pages and in the right for Arabic pages because Arabic is a RTL
language and people are used to start reading pages from right
to left. However this is not a rule, but it is better to
consider it in designing pages. Another issue is the entrance
page. If your website is in two languages, you may add an
entrance page that makes client choose the navigation language
of your website. This page could be a very nice graphical page
with two options for choosing desired language and then enters
the web site in that language.
In some cases, you may consider one language as the base and
eliminate entrance page. In this case, you assume most of the
visitors may use a language that is dominant and they enter
automatically the web pages of your web site that are in that
language. However, visitors would see a small icon in web pages
that lets them switch to the other language. Other method is to
use IP2Country services that can find the country of the visitor
from its IP address and by adding some simple dynamic code to
your pages, you would be able to switch to the language of the
visitor. However, this method is not %100 accurate and you
should expect some margin of error in recognizing the country of
the visitor.
5- Font Face Considerations When you are creating your web pages
in a language other than English, you would be limited in using
font faces. There are a few font faces in windows that are
installed automatically and can show multilingual characters. If
you like your visitors view your pages correct without any need
to install fonts, you have to use those minor number of
multilingual fonts. One of the best font faces is Tahoma that is
somehow easy to read and contains all Unicode characters also is
included in Windows. 6- Database Driven Web Sites If your web
site is a database driven and you have forms that clients may
fill and be posted to database, there would be lots of very
technical issues that you should consider to be able to collect
and retrieve data in different languages. 7- Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a major issue for
multilingual web sites and you should be aware that not
necessarily all major search engines and directories handle
multilingual web pages perfectly and your web site may not be
listed in many of them. Google is a search engine that indexes
multilingual web pages too. There are some issues and
difficulties but it works well enough for your web site to be
indexed in your language.
8- Domain Name
Despite the language of your web site, the domain name should be
in English. At this time, having a domain name in another
language presents another set of issues and the way multilingual
domain names are handled is still a new issue in development.
There are some solutions but are not yet set perfectly. So, I
suggest you forget those solutions and choose an English name
for your web site.
9- Web Server And Hosting
Major web servers, like Microsoft IIS and Apache both support
multilingual web pages, but I strongly recommend you to ask the
hosting company for this issue and make yourself sure that there
wont be problems for your web pages to be served by the hosting
company.
10- Name Web Site Files
Never use Unicode characters in the name of your web pages.
However your operating system, like Windows, lets your choose
the file names in Unicode characters but be %100 sure that
theses web pages would have serious difficulties both server
side and client side. In many cases, you won't be able even to
upload your web pages to your host space and client's browsers
also won't be able to recognize the name of page and would
generate error. This is true for name of images, flash files,
scripts and other pages. Just use English names.
I have tried to cover some of the major issues in developing
multilingual web sites. There are of course, many details I did
not explore. Multilingual sites require some experience and I am
confident you will discover several new issues that are not
included in this article as you work with your own sites. I hope
this helps in your future marketing decisions.
About Author :
David Bell
