The World Wide Web is exactly that – a tool that allows a business, brand or individual to instantly go global and reach out to new markets and audiences around the world. Geographical boundaries mean less and less but linguistic and cultural differences remain, and designing a website that will both reach and appeal to people from different cultural backgrounds remains a challenge.

Content for The Audience

While English is probably the most widely spoken language in the world – if you include non-native speakers and count variations of Chinese as distinct languages rather than dialects – the majority of the world’s population still speaks no English at all. Add to this the fact that non-native speakers are statistically more likely to use sites in their first language, and localised websites with translated content for each market become a must.

It might be tempting to simply put your content through a translation program, but even the best translation software can produce inaccuracies. Try running a passage of text through Google Translate and translating it to a randomly chosen language. Copy and paste the translation and then convert it back to English. It’s likely that there will be grammatical errors and possibly entire shifts of meaning.

Employing a professional translator is the best way to avoid this, and using a native speaker of the target language will help to translate context and nuance and avoid embarrassing faux pas. No one wants to follow the example of Honda, who launched the Fitta automobile in Europe, before discovering that fitta was a colloquial term for female genitalia in Norway and Sweden.

The Right Tools

Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to keep your content separate from page design and will therefore allow for content translation without having to redesign and reformat each page in its entirety. Unicode UTF-8 is a character encoding tool which is compatible with over 90 different scripts or written languages. It’s supported by most common browsers and operating systems and, even if you don’t see much need to go beyond the basic modern Latin (or English) alphabet now, using these tools to construct your website from the start will allow a greater degree of flexibility in the future.

For the Right Design

There is evidence that people of different cultures process visual information differently. A recent study published in the International Journal of Design looked at the perceptions of a sample website when viewed by test groups of Chinese, Koreans and Americans. The study supported R.E. Nisbett’s assertion that holistic or high-context thinkers (including most Asians) take information from the context and whole ‘feel’ of a site, while analytical or low-context thinkers (including most Americans and western Europeans) focus on clear, explicit information.

Even knowing this, it can still be difficult to design a site for each mindset. One way to get to grips with it is to look at the current designs of successful websites in different areas. Where functional minimalism might be effective in Germany, a more decorative and immersive design might work better in India.

Care should also be given to the use of colours. Green or blue backgrounds with black or white text have been found to be the most universally accepted colour schemes, but different colours have different connotations in different cultures. White, for example, may signify marriage and peace in most western societies but is associated with death and mourning in India and China.

Flash can add to the visual appeal of a website but it should generally be used sparingly. Search engine spiders have trouble reading text embedded within Flash, which affects your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) by cancelling out any keywords in the Flash files. It should also be remembered that some regions might have limited access to high speed internet and that too much Flash will lead to prohibitively long loading times.

Get Your Navigation Straight

When considering the navigation bar, it should be remembered that some languages, such as Arabic, are written from right to left. It may be possible to simply switch a vertical navigation bar from the left (where it is commonly located for LTR or left-to-right language websites) to the right-hand side of the page. It offers more continuity however and is probably simpler to design the entire website using horizontal navigation bars.

Go in-country with domain names and servers

Investing in an in-country domain name for country-specific versions of your website (for example .ae for the United Arab Emirates or .fr for France) will help boost your rankings on Google’s country-specific search engines and should therefore help drive local traffic your way. These domains should also be hosted on a server in that country, as this will also help with your local search engine results.

By following these basic tips, you can take the first steps towards building effective websites for a wide range of different cultural target markets, and expand your online audience from a limited language bracket to the entirety of the 1.8bn people currently online.

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