Designing Websites that Speak Every Language

A website should always be developed with its target audience in mind. Who exactly are they? What are they doing on your website? What country are they from? Various audience research methodologies might help you gain a strong understanding of your target consumers. This is important in providing users with the proper items and generating a great digital experience. This may need the creation of a website for foreign audiences.

More than 5 billion people globally use the Internet as of 2023, with about 4 billion of them not speaking English. So, unless your firm is organically local, neglecting global internet audiences risks alienating potential consumers by inadvertently producing a user experience that does not respond to their needs. As a result, your website should appeal to a global audience. But how are you going to accomplish it?

Making an international version of your site with rapid translation plug-ins isn’t enough. Cross-cultural design features that differ from nation to country must be considered and it can be a difficult process. Fortunately, there are practices in place to ensure that digital goods appeal to every target demographic, independent of cultural background.

But first we need to know what is localization?

The process of customizing a website to match the language, culture, and other special demands of a given nation or region by adjusting its content and design aspects to make it acceptable and readily understood by the intended audience is known as localization. This entails more than just translating the text into different languages, it also takes cultural elements into account, such as date and time formats, currencies, measuring systems, and colors, which may change from one nation to the next. By incorporating localization into design practices, content optimization, and content presentation, you may produce a cross-cultural product that passes international usability testing. Following that, we’ll go through some considerations for localizing your website.

How to design a website for international audiences?

Color and imagery

When designing a website for an international audience, color might have different cultural meanings. A Japanese audience, for example, will enjoy the sight of red, yet the same color has a negative meaning for South African users. There is no right version, which is why building responsive designs that adjust to your intended audience is a good rule of thumb. The same is applicable with images. A single featured picture has the power to alter the whole user experience. To minimize misunderstandings, some designers use a minimalist style that is more likely to appeal to a culturally homogenous user base.

More than translation: language, text and typography

Some web designers argue that creating an English version of a website and adding a plug-in to automatically translate it into other popular languages is sufficient. While dominating consumers should define the primary language of your website, more localization work should be directed to adapting for overseas viewers. Some solutions, such as Weglot, can help to streamline the translation process, and Dormakaba successfully adopted it on their website. However, automated translation might be clumsy at times, which can alienate or even insult people in your target market. Thus, human translation monitoring is required to provide a favorable user experience in your target languages.

Furthermore, language and type are critical components of cross-cultural design. Did you know that various languages require varying amounts of space to say the same thing? French, German, and Portuguese typically occupy approximately 30% more space than English. As a result, French sentences will be lengthier than American sentences.

Typography can also be a problem since certain languages feature diacritical signs that do not transfer from one typeface to another. Many content authors use Unicode characters to guarantee that their sites are compatible with most languages.

Finally, if you want to encourage foreign audiences to contact you, ensure that your website contact forms can accommodate an infinite amount of characters, as some overseas visitors may have longer names or phone numbers than domestic users.

Don’t forget about speed!

When ranking sites in organic search results, search engines analyze loading speeds. However, this can be a difficult task because connection speeds vary considerably based on geographical location. However, there is a solution to reduce cross-border load times by implementing a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A CDN is a dispersed network of servers or nodes purposefully placed in several geographic regions to optimize the delivery of digital material or services to end consumers. CDNs may be implemented into practically any website-building platform. This avoids core usability concerns and contributes to digital marketing efforts via search engine optimization. While CDNs might be expensive, they are well worth the expenditure if you want to access the worldwide market.

Be Search Engine-friendly: international SEO and hreflang tags

Your website can get worldwide traction using SEO techniques other than speed. Despite the fact that you may already be an expert in SEO in your own language if you want to succeed on the international stage, you need to think about multiregional or multilingual SEO as a way to tailor your search strategy to the needs of your target markets. International SEO informs search engines that your website caters to visitors from specific regions/countries seeking your services/products in several languages. foreign SEO may help you increase conversions by expanding your client base, uncovering untapped areas & filling them with content, and raising brand awareness in the foreign market.

To build an international SEO strategy, you must provide content that is relevant to the markets you are targeting, as well as design a website structure that allows search engines to easily retrieve the proper items for customers. As a result, you must undertake keyword and subject research, compare yourself to worldwide competition, and create content based on your results.

To send the correct pages to the right visitors, we recommend utilizing hreflang tags. Hreflang tags are used to denote distinct versions of sites based on the searcher’s language and/or locale. They aid in the reduction of bounce rates and the prevention of duplicate material, hence improving the SEO of your website.

In conclusion

It is critical to design a website with its target in mind in order to offer the proper products and create a great digital experience. With over 5 billion internet users globally, failing to reach out to global online audiences risks alienating prospective clients. As a result, you may need to create a website for international audiences. To build a cross-cultural product that passes international usability testing, localization practices such as changing content and design aspects to match the cultural and unique demands of a given country or area are required. Color and images, language, text and design, and website speed may all assist firms in reaching and engaging with foreign audiences. Businesses may expand their reach, develop their client base, and eventually achieve success in the global market by applying these practices.