Possibly the overriding reason for a small to medium-sized business to develop a web presence is the opportunity to offer their products and services on a wider stage. Language is the key to accessibility and by adopting a uni-lingual approach, a company may well be alienating a large number of potential customers

In the part of Spain where I live, the local language is Catalan and just about everyone also speaks Spanish. I imagine that the people who choose to read Catalan language newspapers or switch on the Catalan TV in preference to the Spanish alternatives, do so because they are more comfortable receiving information in their native tongue. The same is true of web sites. The German business person, the French shopper or the casual Mexican visitor would also be more receptive to content in their own language.

The free on-line translation services offer a more than adequate service for casual international visitors to web sites - particularly when taken in conjunction with good use of graphics. Unfortunately the majority of these visitors won't get past the home page and power up the translator unless they have an incentive to explore the site.

A cost-effective way of guiding foreign visitors into a web site is by providing a stepping stone in their own language - a one page presentation with basic product / service /contact information, some carefully chosen graphics and an outline with links to essential parts of the site. If clearly labeled from the home page, the one page approach should prove more than adequate in many cases.

It also allows for effective market research. With a decent stats program, visitors to the foreign language pages can be monitored and, used in conjunction with their feedback, it is possible to make well informed decisions on which language section may need developing and which can be left as is - thus eliminating the need for devoting too much time and money to translations from the outset.

Once a language section has been developed - this may involve producing three or three hundred pages - it can be used to generate more visitors to the web site. Spanish search engines (in fact most of them are actually Yahoo-like directories) will happily receive submissions of multi-language sites as long as the home page is in Spanish. This is easily achieved by structuring the site like this www mycompany com/spanish/.

In the second part of this article we will go on to look at the tips, techniques and technicalities of setting up part of site in a second language.

Part I >>