Building a successful website is no small task, especially if you’re going into business – it takes time, effort and dedication, from working out your business plan and unique selling point (USP) through to designing and managing your website and optimizing it for search engine rankings.

If you’re planning to go global and expand your business worldwide, the first thing you need to know is that creating a website for a foreign market means more than just translating the text of your English website. Cultural differences play a significant part in your future relationship with clients and visitors. Here are some simple steps to build up a mufti cultural website.

Localizing your approach

The one golden rule is that you have to ‘think local’. This means deciding which countries are going to have a gap in their e-commerce market for your product, and then developing individual local web sites for each market, written in their language, designed for their aesthetic preferences and marketed towards their culture.

Cultural background

You should think of a general, unifying design for your websites, regardless of market, in order to create an image for your company. However, this does not mean that you won’t have to adapt and localise the imagery for every foreign market you want to target. For example, websites created for Asian countries should be livelier, full of colours and animations; Western websites should be simple and deliver a clear, straightforward message.

No matter how you change your website, keeping your navigation bars horizontal should save you some trouble when it comes to switching between right-to-left and left-to-right writing/languages.

Top Leven Domains (TLDs) and Sub domains

Once you know what your target market is you can buy an independent top-level domain (TLD) for each country you.
If getting a TLD for each of your foreign language websites proves expensive, you can buy just one TLD and create sub domains or subdirectories for each particular language or market.

Content

The fundamental point here is to make sure that your content is translated correctly. To gain the trust of your potential customers, you will need to ensure that the nuances of the local language and culture are observed.

Tempting though it may be to use an automatic translation program, there is really no substitute for using a professional translator working in their native tongue. Text converted by a machine translation tool rarely reads naturally, and you will run the risk of confusing, or even offending, your target audience.

Meta keywords

Ensure that you are including the best possible keywords in your copy, and if possible in your URL It isn’t enough to simply translate the keywords that you use on your English site on a word-for-word basis; different nationalities use different phrases in their searching habits, including synonyms, acronyms, colloquialisms and abbreviations, and you will need to adapt your keywords accordingly. Google’s keyword tool can help you with this.

Aesthetic preferences

Different cultures have different expectations in terms of what they like in a website – just take a look at the differences between Coca Cola’sJapanese site and their Swedish site, or McDonald’s UK site and their Indian site.