Take your website across cultures with these actionable tips

Preparing a website - including programming, copy, flash and video - for a new language market is no small feat. But with the right planning, approach and execution, your website will reach across borders and motivate your target audience to interact with your brand. Here are our top-10 tips for avoiding common online localization pitfalls:

1. Align your site and global business strategy. Is your site supporting local offices in each market, or is your international presence online only? Look at your business infrastructure to ensure it can support the multilingual site objectives - and vice-versa. Items to consider include local legal requirements, local marketing, local customer support (email, call center), payment processing, sales fulfillment systems and more.
2. Strategize your multilingual navigation. An important but often overlooked aspect of successful web localization include helping people find your site, such as geo-targeting, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), user settings and clear user navigation methods (e.g. pull down menu or splash screen with languages).
3. Use a content management system (CMS). Maintaining site content becomes more complex as you add languages. If you have a large and frequently changing site, use a global-ready CMS to manage the content. Important features include:

a. Ability to easily export and re-import content in a localization-friendly format such as XML b. Filtering and workflows for new/updated content c. Support for all targeted languages

A successfully localized website can drive your business into new language markets. Partnering with an experienced localization partner will save both time and costs in the long run - and ensure that your project launches on time. Visit our website translation services today or explore our portfolio to see how we can help you with your web localization needs.

Photo Credit: Tatiana Niño