Any business owner in the world knows that having a website is a must in this day and age. The times when shop owners knew every client by name are behind us. With over one billion Internet users worldwide, this is one highway everyone should take.
If you?re planning to go global and expand your business worldwide, the first thing you need to know is that creating a website for a foreign market means more than just translating the text of your English website. Cultural differences play a significant part in your future relationship with clients and visitors.
Although it might look slightly overwhelming at first, creating a website for a foreign market can be successfully done by following a few steps:
Stop, pause and think
Before you choose the website colour or font, you should stop, pause and think for a moment: Which country would benefit from your products or services? Which country has room for yet another online business? There?s nothing more frustrating than launching into a new market and being choked by strong competition. Check the other companies out and come up with a few ideas to outsmart them and win at their game.? After carefully choosing your new market, phase two can begin.
Act local
The first thing you need is an individual Top Level Domain (TLD). This helps twofold ? better rankings on local search engines, plus respect and trust from local clients. In case purchasing individual TLDs for you foreign websites proves too expensive, use subdomains for each local site, with their location set in the target country from Google Webmaster Tools.
Cultural background
You should think of a general, unifying design for your websites, regardless of market, in order to create an image for your company. However, this does not mean that you won?t have to adapt and localise the imagery for every foreign market you want to target. For example, websites created for Asian countries should be livelier, full of colours and animations; Western websites should be simple and deliver a clear, straightforward message.
No matter how you change your website, keeping your navigation bars horizontal should save you some trouble when it comes to switching between right-to-left and left-to-right writing/languages.
More than just colours
You might think choosing the right colour is not that much of a problem. Well, think again. Colours play a significant part in day to day culture. Take for example red- it means ?danger? or ?love? in Western cultures, but it stands for ?good luck? and ?celebration? in China. For a safe pick, the general consensus is that blue works fine worldwide.
The ?right? images
You probably realized by now that it?s a bad choice to use the same images for different markets and cultures. An image of an American family enjoying your product won?t have the same effect in China as in the US.
Also, you shouldn?t forget about Low Context (American, German, British etc) and High Context (Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc) cultures, and the impact the differences between them have on web design. For High Context countries, a website bursting with images, colours and the mandatory dancing animations are really important, but that certainly won?t work in the Western society.
Choose the best tools
If you?re going to create a series of localised sites and you want to quickly switch between languages without starting from scratch, then UTF-8 is your answer. With unique code for every character in over 90 languages, UTF-8 can easily switch between German, Arabic or even simplified Chinese.
Another great tool you should take advantage of is Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. This helps you keep the content separated from images. You won?t have to start from fresh if you need to change the language of your content from one localised site to another. Another great thing about CSS is that the size of the files is small and this helps the pages load faster.
If you?re aiming for fast loading pages, keep in mind that a Flash heavy website will slow everything down. Visitors won?t wait 2 minutes for a home page to load and you might lose potential clients.
Content is the heart of your website
The most important part of your newly localised websites will be its content. Nothing ruins a customer?s desire to buy your products quicker than spelling mistakes, grammar errors or odd phrasing.
While it is cheaper to use machine translation tools, such as Google Translate, or various translation widgets on your website, the safest option is to seek professional help. A native translator will ensure your copy is professionally translated, taking into account everything from abbreviations, jargon and colloquialisms to culture-specific phrases.
Cross cultural web design may seem like a lot to take in at first but the results are more than worth it. Following these simple steps and, more importantly, doing some research before you get started, will surely pave your road to going global.
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Something Similiar: Review of The Smashing Book #2Source: http://www.amberweinberg.com/7-steps-to-cross-cultural-web-design/
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