The second you launch your website online, you’re instantly accessible by an estimated audience of 1.8 billion people (internetworldstats.com). The thing is, 78% of those web surfers don’t speak English as a first language – in fact, Chinese is close to becoming the dominant language of the internet, with 407 million online Chinese speakers quickly closing the gap with the 499 million online English speakers.

If your website is in the business of selling, then these statistics become especially important when you consider that research has proven that 85% of online consumers will not buy a product if they can’t read about it in their own native language (Common Sense Advisory, 2006).

When you’re first looking at the design and outlay of your site, you’re likely to be thinking more about how to be innovative, how to accurately communicate your brand’s message through design, and how to facilitate a smooth and pleasant interaction experience, rather than how easily your website can be adapted to suit the different languages and different cultures of foreign countries.

However, with a little bit of pre-planning, you can create a website design that can be easily adapted to the requirements of any foreign language and culture, expanding your online audience to, potentially, every web surfer in the world.

There are a lot of different countries and cultures on the web

Consider your potential audiences

Before you even start thinking about the design of your website, it’s helpful to consider which foreign language markets you might want to adapt your site for further down the line. Thinking the Chinese market might be a wise decision? Then put a little time into researching what’s popular in Chinese website design and what their e-commerce habits are.

Different cultures have been proven to have different ways of processing information, and different aesthetic preferences as far as design, color schemes and navigation go, (especially between eastern and western cultures) so it can only be to your advantage to learn about the e-commerce and design preferences of each of your future markets before you start structuring the site.

Create a flexible design

Your next step is to consolidate everything you’ve learnt about design trends and shopping habits in your desired markets, and then use this information to come up with a website design that has strong, consistent branding, but is also flexible enough to be adapted to different Top Level Domains (TLDs) for each foreign market without losing its ‘sense of self’.

Take into account how the imagery will need to change to be relevant to each market, what sections you will give prominence to on each site (for instance, will your front page feature ‘About Us’ text or will it get straight to the products?), how your color schemes will change, how you will use multimedia for each foreign market and even how large and long your lines and grids will need to be to accommodate different language scripts (and in which direction the languages will be scrolling).

Use the right tools

If you’re changing the language of your text regularly between sites and pages, you don’t want to have to rebuild each page from scratch using a different text encoding tool. Using Unicode UTF-8 as your character encoder will save you trouble – it has individual codes for each character in over 90 different languages, is supported by all the commonly used browsers and operating systems, and is compatible with your standard web design programs, including Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage.

Furthermore, using CSS, with its capacity to keep your content separate from your design, will make your life a lot easier when it comes to switching around the language of your copy between localized sites.

Translate your text

Even more important than making sure your design is appropriate for each foreign market is making sure that your text is appropriate. Language is a tricky area – it is fluid and ever changing, and the differences can often be great even between dialects within the one language. The potential for mistakes and confusion is great, and nothing will turn a reader away from your site faster than incomprehensible or incorrect text – it destroys your image of reliability and credibility.

Therefore, it’s essential to have your text translated by an expert working into their native language – not only will that ensure that the idiom and expressions are correct, it will also help you to ensure that the actual tone, style and content is appropriate for the culture of your audience – the last thing you want is to inadvertently offend a potential customer.

Target your SEO for each market

Once you take the step of creating localized and optimized websites for foreign markets, your next step is to make sure people can find them. This is where localized SEO comes into play – you need to make sure you’re focusing your SEO efforts on the algorithm of the most popular search engine for your target market (Google may be king in the English market, but many other languages have their own equivalent, such as Baidu for China and Yandex for Russia).

More importantly, though, you need to make sure your keywords are localized for each market – the direct English translation of a term is not always the correct one. Research your keywords on a keyword tool like Google’s and you’ll quickly find out what the most popular local search terms are for anything from car insurance to club sandwiches.