Rules of the trade
September 30, 2007
I have a new rule #1 when crafting websites for new clients.
- Assume from the start that a website will be international.
This means two things in particular: (i) provide a framework for supporting many languages and (ii) allow international addresses in billing, shipping, and contact forms. Even if the client is certain that they will never, ever have an international audience, do this. (In three years, the director of the organization is going to move to Japan and will want to share the website with some Japanese friends and then it will be mission critical that the website be in Japanese.) There are a plethora of tools that make it dead-simple to build a language-neutral website, so use them.
Comments
Jason writes:
Yes, yes, yes! Most modern Web frameworks make this easy (Struts, JSTL, Grails, etc.). However, in addition to supporting international addresses/phone numbers, people often forget about other ways localization can impact the UI design of a Web site, specifically graphic design.
Consider the navigation elements on a site. What might happen to their width and spacing as the navigation text is translated to another language? Might the text become longer (wider)? This is often true when translating English to Spanish. Might the alignment of text change in some way (e.g., if the language is read right-to-left instead of left-to-right)?
Enough procrastinating from me. Back to preparing lectures... :-)