Globalization: Your Website can Help Your Business Expand
Global Customer Base
If your company's product can be shipped anywhere or
you perform services that can be completed and delivered online, then
you can benefit from the global nature of the internet. By having a
professional website that is ranked high on Google, Yahoo, and other
search engines, your are making your services and products available
to customers everywhere.
If your company is focused on a niche market
or offers a highly specialized service or product, then you may be feeling
like you have exhausted the local market - getting your website online
as soon as possible will open up new opportunities and sources of revenue.
Getting Serious About Going Global
Just being online and well ranked on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines will
immediately open some doors to global customers to some degree. If you really want to
expand into the global market you should consider it as a major initiative for your
business. To be really effective you will need to expand into one market /
geographic region / culture at a time and do all of the business analysis of that
market so that you can tailor your products and service to the demands of that
particular economy.
Similarly, your website will need to be tailored to each different market that you
are targeting. The are two generalized approaches to customizing your website
for different cultures / markets, one is called Multi-Language Support and the
other is called Localization.
Multiple Language Support
In order to get multiple language support on your site, it is best to find a content
management system that has multi-language features build in as a core design element.
In other words, you want to avoid using a CMS in which multiple language support was an
after-thought that was patched / hacked into the system. If the multi-language features
were a major consideration when the CMS was designed, then it probably means that
it works well and relatively hassle free for you to use.
Multiple Language support entails a number of features:
- Rendering pages with text based on the currently selected language.
- Independent management of layout and copy text, so that you don't have to make duplicate pages for each language.
- Language dependent image support is critical because most images have text in them.
- Language based font face and font size configuration.
- Multi-language features are applied to all aspects of the CMS including navigation bars, menus, error messages.
Localization
Localizing your website is taking multiple langauge support to higher level because the
objective is to customize the site to the culture that you are targeting, not simply
translate the text. Localization often involves creating completely separate web
pages for the different cultures that you want to support.
Most content management systems will not provide any localization specific features, but you
might find that a CMS with Version and Release Management features will facilitate the
creation and management of several different localized versions of your existing site.