Worldly Web Design - Thinking global from the start
May 2010 heralded a major change in the way
the world experiences the Web. For those of
you in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France,
Germany, Spain or any other country
whose written language is formed by
a Latin-based alphabet system, this
change may have passed you by.
ICANN switched on a system that enables full URLs that
contain no Latin characters. This opens the door for the
likes of Arabic, Chinese, Thai and Hebrew scripts to be
used entirely within a Web address, and includes the
country code.
The ramifications are huge. It has been described as one
of the most significant changes since the dawn of the modern
Internet era.
Why would this be of interest to you? The Web has
traditionally been very Western-centric and, more specifically,
English-language centric. But with online populations
growing at breakneck speed across the world, this
latest development is another major step toward making
the Web a genuine global entity.
When you consider that Asia is home to over 40 percent
of the world’s Internet population; China has almost a third
more people online than the U.S.; and, crucially, 75 percent
of Earth’s overall population, the need for businesses to think
international is becoming increasingly vital.
So how can Web designers and developers of the world
help the cause? And what role can Internet professionals
play in making the Web a truly global place?
Even if the plan at the start is to have a single website
in English, there are a number of simple steps that can be
taken to ensure a website is flexible and easily adaptable
to the cultural and linguistic requirements of the global
community.
USING UNICODE
Content is king — a well-worn adage in online marketing
circles. But for Web designers it’s a mantra worth repeating.
All the bells and whistles in the world are no substitute for
quality content — it is what ultimately makes visitors come
back for more.
Unicode is a computing-industry standard designed to
make text-representation consistent across the world’s many
different writing systems. The Unicode Consortium consists
of the likes of Adobe Systems, Microsoft, Google and Apple
and they work in the joint interest of creating international
text-processing standards. Unicode covers 90 different
scripts (written languages) and has a repertoire of over
100,000 different characters.
UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode
and should be familiar to most developers. It’s also
compatible with most of the common browsers and
platforms, which is why UTF-8 is a good option for those wishing to create a website that’s easy to extend into other
languages, such as Arabic or Chinese.
For PHP scripters, it’s worth noting that PHP has string
functions and multi-byte string functions; the latter of which
supports characters that use more than byte (e.g. UTF-8
characters). This is crucial when manipulating strings with
non-Latin characters.
If you’re averse to PHP (or simply don’t use it), at the
very least it’s worth verifying that your programming language
of choice can manipulate multi-byte strings correctly.
SEPARATE CONTENT
FROM DESIGN
Word length can vary greatly between languages. For
example, German tends to use much longer words than
the equivalent in English: Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung
means “speed limit.” Many Asian languages, such as
Chinese and Korean, require much less space on a Web
page than English.
When designing a website, it’s crucial to bear this in
mind. Don’t hard-code widths to elements that hold text —
words should be permitted to flow and expand as required.
A solution here is to separate your content from the design.
Cascading style sheets (CSS) enable table-free design and
ultimately keeps content and design apart; which means
each page won’t need to be designed from scratch.
As a slight aside, any aspect of your website that facilitates
user input (e.g. fields or forms) should not stipulate arbitrary
(and usually unnecessary) character restrictions on
the input.
REMEMBER DIAL-UP?
So, you have high-speed broadband Internet on tap ... lucky
you. But, believe it or not, many parts of Latin America,
Africa, Asia and the Middle East still get by on connections
of a couple of hundred of kbps — sometimes even less.
The point is, if you have lots of Flash animation and
other bandwidth-sapping graphics, you may be preventing
key parts of the world from accessing your pages. This is not
to suggest developing text-only websites, only that you
might want to develop two versions of your website to give
users a choice — a simple HTML version and a flashy bells-and-whistles version.
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS
It’s easy to overlook this one. Culture is a dynamic built into
our personas from a young age. Because of this, we often
don’t realize that what’s funny, interesting or alluring to us
may be offensive or off-putting to other cultures.
For this reason, it is best to avoid any potentially divisive
images or material — this would include anything to do
with religion, gender, nationality or age. What’s simply an
attractive sales model to you might be offensive to more conservative
cultures.
Then there’s the issue of color. In Europe and North
America, red can denote danger, love, passion, excitement
and Christmas (with green). In many Middle-Eastern and
Asian cultures, red is synonymous with celebration, good
luck, long life and purity.
Orange relates to courage or love in Japan, but for protestants
in Ireland, it has religious connotations. And in conjunction
with black, orange is also a color used for
Halloween in the U.S.
In western cultures, pink is usually viewed as a feminine
color, as is the case in East India. But in Japan, pink is a popular
color with both genders.
There are many similar examples of how colors can hold
different meanings across the world. And this should be factored
into any website color scheme.
These are just some of the things you should consider
when setting up a globally-appealing website. Adaptability
and flexibility should be built into any website’s architecture
as you never know who you will want to target further down
the line.
The Internet is global. But for the designers and developers
of the world to go global, they need to think local.
About the Author: Christian Arno is founder of Lingo24, a global translation company
that specializes in website localization.


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