[thelist] Bilingual Website

[Barney Carroll]

Well here's a point (and maybe not as obvious as it seems): make language
selection a highly visible component of the site furniture but DON'T make it
a navigation decision: there's nothing worse than "select your language to
enter the site".

Regards,
Barney Carroll
Web designer & front-end developer

web: www.clickwork.net

mobile: +44 (0) 7594 506 381
home: +44 (0) 118 975 0020

twitter: @barneycarroll


2009/4/6 Octavian Rasnita <orasnita at gmail.com>

> This is true, but not always.
> I found that most web users use IE, and most IE users from my country don't
> bother (or know how) to configure their browser to prefer their native
> language and not the default English.
>
> If they visit a site that offer the content depending on the prefered
> language, they would see the page in English, and I found that very often
> some of them fight to understand what appears on the page but don't click
> the link for changing the language to their native one.
>
> Of course, these days these things are solved by forcing them to install
> the
> OS and the browser already configured for their native language and this is
> not such a big problem anymore.
> (Although it is a problem for me, because I don't like to use a localized
> OS
> and browser and I need to do more clicks in order to install the one which
> has an interface in English :-)
>
> --
> Octavian
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kimberley Rivero" <kimberley.rivero at gmail.com>
> To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
> Sent: Monday, April 06, 2009 12:06 AM
> Subject: Re: [thelist] Bilingual Website
>
>
> >I want to say that I think it's a bad idea to determine which language
> > to deliver simply by geo-locating from the IP.  The user's default
> > language is a far preferable factor to go by.
> >
> > As an English speaker living in a Spanish speaking country I can tell
> > you that I get quite frustrated when I'm delivered a Spanish page just
> > because of my location.
> >
> > Also if your site needs to give a star performance in search engine
> > placement in specific countries then you may find that you will do
> > better to buy a new domain for each language, one that uses the
> > country specific extension.
> >
> > For example it's been my experience that sites in Spanish targeted at
> > Mexico have an advantage over a regular .com site if they use the
> > .com.mx extension.
> >
> > Thanks, Kim
> > --
> >
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