With the increasing popularity of the internet, the world seems to be becoming a smaller place. You can communicate with people all over the world, and they are just a mouse click away from you. With the web making all of this possible, people are starting to look to foreign markets for advertising.
Since it is so simple to send information all over the world, why not increase your brand awareness all over the world? Before you can create content for people in other countries, you have to break through some barriers. For starters, will your intended audience speak English? The chances are that they will not, and if they do, they might not speak it fluently.
In order to alter your website for an overseas market, you will have to consider several factors, and tweak your site accordingly.
Hopefully your website was made using Unicode. However, if it was not, you might have quite a bit of work to do to change things. There are varying languages spoken overseas, and this comes with the hassle of different alphabets. If you use UTF-8 you can use your code for over 90 different languages, and can incorporate almost any non English code that you can think up.
You might not realise it, but there are languages which are read from the right to the left side of the page. If you are going to launch your site overseas, you might need to alter the layout of your page. This might include changes where navigation bars are located. You do not have to make these changes, and it is all up to you and your creative decision making process.
Flash is popular on many websites. However, if you have a lot of Flash on your website, you might need to redo it entirely. Remember that not all countries have wide access to high speed internet services. If you have too many graphics and animations on your site, it might not load very fast overseas. There is nothing worse than waiting a long time for a site to load, and it can often drive people away. Do not waste all of your hard work. Do some research and make sure that your site is going to load well on people’s computers.
Make sure that you always have great content. This is the one factor that will influence people to come back to your site the most. If you have your content all written in English, you are going to have to have it translated. Make sure that you hire someone with great skills to do this job. There is nothing worse than reading a poorly translated website. If you have ever tried to do this, you will realize how frustrating it is.
It also shows people that you did not care enough about them to make the effort to do things right. You should not rely on automatic machine translation, because it just will not do the job properly. Using a real person to translate will also allow you to pick up any cultural differences that need to be changed.
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