WEB DESIGN ARTICLES

All articles on this site are
Published & Distributed by Dunway Enterprises

http://web-design.dunway.com

TO MAKE MONEY USING GOOGLE ADSENSE - CLICK HERE

It's a World Wide Web - Going International

FREE ARTICLE # 99

While many websites seem to assume that everyone lives in America and speaks English, most of the world, oddly enough, doesn't. If you want your website to be successful internationally, you need to make your content available in languages other than English.

Machine Translation.

A good first step in taking your website international is to offer links to translate it at a free machine translation service, such as Babelfish or Google’s Page Translator. These services take your text and attempt to translate it automatically as best as they can.

However, translating text is a difficult problem, and even quite complicated grammatical rules tend to produce text that is only just understandable. It's usable in an emergency, but not exactly pleasant, and not something you want your visitors to be relying on - especially considering that it won't work on interactive pages, and that the number of languages available is quite limited.

Hiring Translators.

The next step up the ladder, then, is to consider hiring professional translators to translate your website's content and navigation elements into each language. While this is fine for larger companies, in many cases it's prohibitively expensive, at least if you do it for more than a few languages.

If you are thinking of hiring a translator, the best approach is to first get your site translated into English (if it’s not already in English), and then get it translated into the languages spoken by your largest groups of visitors.

Volunteer Translators.

If you have a popular community website, or one with articles that lots of people find useful, then you might find that people even volunteer to translate your articles for free - you can give them a little encouragement by putting a message on the bottom of your pages asking for help in translation.

Depending on what kind of website you run, you might be able to offer incentives like free products or free membership.

You have to bear in mind that translations you get from volunteers are unlikely to be professional quality, but they’ll at least be readable and approximately correct. Even a very bad human translator tends to do better than machine translation.

To make sure you’re not putting up any embarrassingly bad translations, you can give readers an opportunity to rate and give feedback on the translation, and remove it if it seems to be doing more harm than good. You will often find that visitors suggest corrections to the translation, making it get gradually better and better.

Deciding What to Send.

One of the biggest mistakes international websites make is asking users to choose for themselves which country they’re in or which language they want out of a list. Not only is this annoying for the user, but it’s insulting if their country or language isn’t there.

The worst thing about all this nonsense is that there’s absolutely no need for it. Web browsers send the computer’s country and language settings to your website in the HTTP headers, if you can be bothered to take account of them - a tiny amount of scripting on your part can save your visitors a lot of trouble.

Not only is this approach easier, but it’s also seamless - the user just goes to your website, and it’s in the language they wanted. You should still offer a choice, but make it a small option in the corner, not the entire front page.

Physical Products Around the World.

Of course, a web design article is no place to discuss the actual logistics of international shipping, but it is important to design your website to take account of it. If you’re planning to deliver physical products worldwide, you need to generalise your forms enough to take account of it.

Offer address lines that aren’t overly specific in what they ask for, and do little validation - no one wants to be told that their address is ‘invalid’. Also, make sure you change shipping costs dynamically to take account of the country where the user is based, as this is more than likely the country where they’ll want things to be posted to.

You also need to take account of international payment, and make sure you can accept as many kinds of payment as possible, as preferences vary from country to country.

Not every country is as reliant on credit cards as you might expect.

WEB DESIGN INDEX LISTING

SITE MAP

  1. 6 Reasons Why You Need a Website
  2. How the Web Works
  3. Registering a Domain Name
  4. The Confusing World of Web Hosting - Making Your Decision
  5. How to Set Up Your Hosting in 5 Minutes Flat
  6. Websites and Web logs - What's the Difference?
  7. What Do You Want Your Website to Do?
  8. Hiring Professionals - 5 Things to Look For
  9. Working With Templates
  10. Building a Budget Website
  11. There's More than One Web Browser
  12. Image Formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG and More
  13. The Many Flavours of HTML
  14. Clean Page Structure - Headings and Lists
  15. The Importance of Validation
  16. Avoiding the Nuts and Bolts - Content Management Software
  17. FrontPage - Easy Pages
  18. Dreamweaver - The Professional Touch
  19. What You See Isn't Always What You Get
  20. Why Doing It Yourself is Best
  21. Understanding Web Jargon
  22. Don't Be Scared, It's Only Code - HTML for Beginners
  23. 5 Steps to Understanding HTML
  24. Taking HTML Further
  25. Finding a Good HTML Editor
  26. CSS and the End of Tables
  27. Column Designs with CSS
  28. The Basics of Web Servers
  29. LAMP - The Most Popular Server System Ever
  30. IIS and ASP - Microsoft's Server
  31. Setting up a Test Server on Your Own Computer
  32. How Databases Work
  33. Which Database is Right for You?
  34. Uploading Your Website with FTP
  35. PHP - Easy Dynamic Websites
  36. Perl - Cryptic Power
  37. ColdFusion - Quicker Scripting, at a Price
  38. JSP - Java on Your Server
  39. Python and Ruby - the Newer Alternatives
  40. Taking HTML Further with Javascript
  41. VBScript - Javascript Made Easy
  42. AJAX - Should You Believe the Hype?
  43. The Web Designer's Toolbox
  44. An Introduction to Paint Shop Pro
  45. Photoshop - a Graphic Designer's Dream
  46. Free Graphics Alternatives
  47. How to Install and Configure a Forum
  48. Building Online Communities
  49. Using Quizzes and Games to Get Traffic
  50. Offering Free Downloads on Your Website
  51. Putting Multimedia to Good Use
  52. Opening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software
  53. 5 Simple Steps to Accepting Payments
  54. Encryption & Security with SSL
  55. The Basics of Web Forms
  56. 7 Ways to Make Your Web Forms Better
  57. The Web is Not Paper
  58. Writing for the Web
  59. A Question of Scroll Bars
  60. Titles and Headlines - It's Not a Newspaper
  61. All About Design - Principles and Elements
  62. Designing for Search Engines
  63. Printing and Sending - the Two Things Users Want to Do
  64. The Art of the Logo
  65. Picking a Colour Scheme
  66. Fonts are More Important Than You Think
  67. Beware the Stock Photographer - Picking Your Pictures
  68. The Smaller, the Better - Avoiding Graphical Overload
  69. An Issue of Width - the Resolution Problem
  70. Why Word is Bad for the Web
  71. The 5 Principles of Effective Navigation
  72. Focus on the User - Task-Oriented Websites
  73. Making Searches Simple
  74. Time for User Testing
  75. Hints All the Way
  76. The Case Against Flash
  77. Using Flash Sensibly
  78. The Evils of PDF's
  79. Why Java Will Drive Your Visitors Away
  80. 5 Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look
  81. Content is King
  82. Why You Should Put Your Content in a Weblog Format
  83. Cut to the Chase - How to Make Your Website Load Faster
  84. How to Run Ads Without Driving Visitors Crazy
  85. Ads Under the Radar - Linking to Affiliates
  86. Text Ads - Unobtrusive Advertising
  87. The Top 10 Biggest Web Design Mistakes
  88. Why You Should Stick to Design Conventions
  89. 10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
  90. Making Friends and Influencing People - the Importance of Links
  91. How to Get Your Website Talked About on Blogs
  92. Tracking Your Visitors
  93. RSS - Really Simple Syndication
  94. Taking Your Website Mobile
  95. Registering Your Users by Stealth
  96. How to Make Visitors Add You to Their Favourites
  97. Setting Up a Mailing List
  98. Designing for Sales
  99. It's a World Wide Web - Going International
  100. Some Places to Go For More Information

Article Content - Free & Re-Printable!

Guidelines & Information for Publishers

Dunway Enterprises offers free article content [this means, as a publisher you may re-print my article(s)
subject to the terms & conditions that generally apply to free content articles.

The most common of these are:

  1. The article/articles must be published "as is" (unedited).
  2. Articles must be published with my Name & Company and Copyright Information.
  3. URLs shown within any article or resource box should be set as hyperlinks
  4. Articles cannot be used in spam communications.
  5. I encourage publishers to use this site as a free content resource.
    However, if you use the content, please provide, a link to this site.

Disclaimer: Information shown in the article shown above
does not in any way constitute medical, financial or legal advice.

If you require such advice, you should seek appropriate professional guidance.

More Free Articles to Choose From!

What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense!
NEW Expanded 2nd Edition!

"A battle-tested AdSense Manual that picks up where Google left off,
handing you the secret keys to multiplying your Google AdSense Income
with a series of lazy - 10 second tweaks!"

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE!

FREE GIFTS CLICK HERE

Potential keywords for your next Google ad campaign
Adsense Killer Keywords

IF YOU CAN'T FIND THE INFORMATION OR THE PRODUCT
THAT YOUR LOOKING FOR - CHECK OUT THE CLICKBANK CATALOGUE
Over 10,000 Products to Choose From!

Business to Business  -  Health & Fitness  -  Home & Family
Computing & Internet  -  Money & Employment  -  Marketing & Ads
Fun & Entertainment  -  Sports & Recreation  -  Society & Culture

ClickBank the best way to complete a digital sale.

Google

If you're into Niche Resale Rights Products then check out my eBooks Site
which has 120 + different eBook Packages and still growing.

The Ultimate Recipe Collection [Cook Books]
CURRENTLY [57] DIFFERENT RECIPE E-BOOKS ON THIS PAGE
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE LIST

Mail Order Products

Dunway Enterprises || Dunway Sitemap

WebMaster & Site Design by Ken Dunn

Dunway's Network of Joint Venture Sites

CLICK HERE TO SEND MAIL

Copyright [c] Dunway Enterprises

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WEB DESIGN ARTICLES