Designing tips for global websites

It is perhaps an obvious thing to say, but the world wide web truly is a global phenomenon. Anyone with an internet connection can access your little corner of cyberspace – and yet the vast majority of websites are built with only one language and culture in mind as the target audience. English remains the most widely used language on the internet (Internet World Stats) but still accounts for only around a quarter of all usage, and studies have shown that even multilingual web users prefer to use websites in their own native language. A multilingual approach to website design will open up whole new online markets in the foreign language internet – but there’s more to the design process than simply throwing your content through a translation program. topLanguages2019   Lost in translation The issue of translation is, of course, vitally important and it can be achieved most cost effectively by building a translation widget such as Babelfish or Google…

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