Comments on: Make Your International Visitors Feel Welcome

By: Zeph Snapp

Zeph Snapp — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:49:24 +0000

Haro,
Agreed. This is crucial for Europe. The only exception is when you talk about locations. Because if people are looking for the closest hotel, they will need to break it down by country rather than by language.

By: Zeph Snapp

Zeph Snapp — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:48:04 +0000

Thanks Martin!
The language stuff is so easy to get wrong…

As far as responsive design, I frankly hadn’t given it much thought until I wrote this piece, but now we are considering a site redesign as almost 30% of our traffic comes from mobile.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you will take the time to check out our company blog from time to time!

By: Haro

Haro — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:52:13 +0000

Thanks for the tips Zeph, speciall the one about the flags :-)

You have the same problem with a french flag, when french is also spoken in Belgium, Canada or Switzerland or with the german flag as their ar german speaking people in Austria, Switzerland and Luxemburg as well.

By: Martin Oxby - Inverness

Martin Oxby - Inverness — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:16:25 +0000

Great piece. Despite the fact that I speak French as well as English, it still hadn’t crossed my mind about the multiple countries that speak the ‘same’ language – and hadn’t realised the accidental offence that could be caused by using flags – a really valid point.

Responsive Web Design? Definitely the way forward – apps have to be developed for each specific platform and updated/upgraded with new OS releases, whereas responsive designs are OS agnostic, and therefore just needs to be kept up to date for different screen resolutions when new devices are released, no costly updating of software and no annoying app upgrades for users. Definitely the route we’re promoting.

Great piece :-)

By: Dana DiTomaso

Dana DiTomaso — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:01:49 +0000

Great idea!

By: Zeph Snapp

Zeph Snapp — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:59:39 +0000

That’s a great point Dana,
When we have an SMB who comes to us for this kind of project, we generally offer them the option of answering their phone/chat/email in Spanish for the first few months. Because the person who did the website translation is responsible, the client can be sure that someone will answer correctly.
It’s a nice way to get started.

By: Dana DiTomaso

Dana DiTomaso — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:48:24 +0000

In addition to Zeph’s great points, if you don’t have enough language knowledge in-house to translate, how are you ever going to serve those customers in their language if they contact you?

By: Zeph Snapp

Zeph Snapp — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:46:06 +0000

Hi Gavski,
I agree wholeheartedly I’ve got a whole ‘nother post worth of language differences just in Latin America! And if I am a user and see machine translations, it is spam to me.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:13:53 +0000

Sometimes, international visitors can lead to greater CPC in a website.

By: Gavski

Gavski — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:24:50 +0000

Nice wee summation – I’ve found a reoccurring problem lies with some organisations who actually think that a language only translation will suffice in ensuring geotargeting, and as such I’m often drawn into explaining a language only versus language / country approach to content provision.

With regard to automatic translations I’d always shy away from them not only for the mediocre experience they offer as you’ve mentioned, but also due to the fact that Google doesn’t like automatically translated pages:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192

“Automated translations don’t always make sense and could be viewed as spam.”