The inexorable growth of the internet has meant that, in some respects, distance and geographical boundaries are less important than they once were.

Your website or blog can reach anyone with an internet connection – from Birmingham and Bangladesh, to Baghdad and Beijing.

Global commerce has never been easier but, while physical distances might not be as important, linguistic and cultural barriers still exist. There are many practical issues worth bearing in mind when you design a cross-cultural website.

Content conversion

The most obvious part of creating a globally accessible website is translation. Building a translation widget such as Babelfish or Google Translate into your site is the easiest and cheapest method – and it means you don’t have to worry about the fact that the only languages you speak are English and, er, English.

Using inline translation code is more involved but will allow a more intuitive user experience as the content is automatically translated according to their location and preferences.

Machine translation can be prone to errors, however. A native speaking translator from your target market will help avoid contextual mistakes and cultural faux pas, but this is also the most expensive option and it may come down to a judgement call based on resources against efficacy.

In terms of SEO, whichever translation method you opt for, you should never rely on machine or straight ‘dictionary’ translations for your keywords – colloquialisms, abbreviations or other alternative terms may be more successful within particular markets.

A direct French translation of ‘car insurance’, for example, could yield the term ‘l’assurance automobile‘. However, Google’s keyword tool shows that this is not as popular a search term as ‘assurance auto‘ and ‘assurance voiture‘. A little local knowledge and thorough research is essential here. Keywords are, after all, hugely important when it comes to directing traffic your way; there’s no point having content that people can understand if they’re never going to find it amongst the labyrinth of existing online content.

Separate content from design

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are ideal for cross-cultural websites as they allow the design to be kept separate from the content. This means the content can be translated and/or rewritten without having to redesign each page again from scratch.

CSS also allows you to easily ‘flip’ the direction of text for scripts that read from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. You will also need a good character encoding tool. Unicode UTF-8 is compatible with over 90 written languages and is supported by most common browsers. Even if you don’t foresee the need to expand beyond Latin-based scripts right now, it will give you the flexibility to do so in future, as well as incorporating all the ‘special’ characters from extended Latin alphabets (such as the German Ä, Ö, Ü and ß).

Design considerations

The visual appeal of a website can vary between cultures. An obvious point is to avoid images that might cause offence – pictures of skimpily dressed holidaymakers might be fine for a travel website in the west, but might not be acceptable in more conservative cultures. Different colours may also have different connotations in different places. White can signify marriage in the west but death and mourning in certain eastern cultures and care should be taken that your colour schemes reflect the theme and tone of your content.

In-country domains

Search engines use algorithms that take location into account as well as relevance and other factors such as back-links when determining your site’s rankings. Using individual country code top-level domains (or ccTLD’s) such as .fr for France or .jp for Japan will boost your ranking considerably, especially if you ensure the site is hosted on a server physically located within your target market.

Google advises that you never have more than one language on the same page as this can confuse its bots and, even if you avoid the expense and maintenance issues involved with setting up separate ccTLD’s, you should at the very least use separate sub-domains or sub-directories for your localised pages of content. An example of a sub-domain would be fr.example.com and a subdirectory would be example.com/fr/. Google has a Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools that allows you to specify geographic targets for different sub-directories or sub-domains and, while not quite as effective as using separate ccTLD’s, this will still help boost your rankings.