The internet may be global, but that doesn’t mean web designers can adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Language aside, there are a whole host of cultural complexities to consider when targeting your carefully constructed web pages to the international masses.

It has been proven that people interact with web interfaces in different ways, depending on their culture.

A computer screen contains a myriad of metaphors, designed to make visitors time on the website as easy as possible: pages, links, scroll bars, icons, bookmarks, checkouts, folders…these are all terms and things people are familiar with from the real, physical world and make the virtual world easier to palate.

With this in mind, people have different mental models for information that’s represented visually, whilst the likes of layouts, colors, navigation and general interface interaction is entirely dependent on a person’s real-world experiences – which is affected by their country and culture.

For this reason, web designers must consider the end user from a cultural perspective when developing web sites.

Having said that, it is almost impossible to develop a website that is compatible with every culture. But designers can put the basic structure in place early on in the process, so that the site is easier to adapt at a later point.

Color

Probably one of the first things any web designer considers, is the color scheme. Colors can mean different things to different cultures – for example, black denotes ‘death’ in many western cultures, but in many eastern cultures, white is the color for this.

Similarly, red signifies ‘danger’ or ‘passion’ in western cultures, but it can mean ‘purity’ in India. Furthermore, Orange can represent ‘autumn’ (fall), or Halloween in many regions, but in Northern Ireland, it has religious connotations for protestants.

Green or blue backgrounds, in conjunction with black or white text has proven to be the most universally popular colors for web users, so if you’re planning on appealing to a large global audience, it’s maybe worth keeping this in mind.

Text: Unicode

Unicode is a standard numeric representation of characters that can currently be used for over 90 scripts, and has a repertoire of over 100,000 characters.

UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode that is familiar to most programmers. It is the best option when creating websites for global markets, as it allows you to use characters from countless alphabets. For example, German uses the ‘Eszett’ symbol (ß) in place of ‘ss’, whilst three German vowels use the Umlaut (ä, ö and ü). These are all classed as separate characters to a, o and u from the English alphabet.

Most of the popular web design applications facilitate the creation of Unicode documents which allows you to choose the language of your pages and insert appropriate HTML tags within the code.

The design/Layout

The layout and navigation of a website is a very important aspect of the design process. Whilst having a standard design template aids consistency across your various web pages, it shouldn’t impede your website’s dexterity. The template must facilitate the use of longer texts, tables, graphics, images etc. For instance, German typically uses longer words than English, so you may need the option of additional space when translating your English text into other tongues.

Similarly, many languages such as Arabic and some Asian scripts read from right to left, which will impact how your navigation bar is laid out – it may be aligned vertically on the left or horizontally across the top. Indeed, for websites that exist in more than one language, to avoid having to develop a different template for each language, it may be worth using a horizontal menu bar to avoid the issue aesthetically balancing your website’s navigation system for different languages.

Domains

It may be cheaper and more convenient to have a single domain for all your different language websites, but from a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective, many argue that you’re best to invest in separate domains for each country; so, for example, www.mybusiness.co.uk for the UK, www.mybusiness.de for Germany, www.mybusiness.nl for the Netherlands etc.

This helps Google to ‘rank’ each of your sites on its in-country search engines (Google.co.uk, Google.de, google.nl etc). Furthermore, each of your country websites should be hosted on a server in the target country, as Google uses its location to help identify the location of the website and, subsequently, how your site ranks on its country-specific search engines. This is known as geo-targeting.

This is just the very basics of multilingual web design. By building a flexible, adaptable website from the start, the process of launching your website for other languages and cultures later on is far easier. And as the old saying goes, failing to plan is planning to fail.

About The Author:

Christian Arno

Christian Arno is Managing Director of global translation company Lingo24, a company that also specialises in website localization. With clients in over sixty countries and 112 full-time employees across the globe, Lingo24 achieved a turnover of $6m USD in 2009.