Making a Web Site Available to the World

By Grant McNamara

You've a great web site and it's working well. Sales are good, the site is listed on
search engines, and hits are great. What can you do now? Well you could sit back
and do nothing. But just maybe you might want to expand your potential market.
There's a big world out there and every day of every week, all over the world,
thousands more people get connected to the Internet.

A relatively small effort would allow many of them to buy from your site.

I live in New Zealand; it's a small country in the South Pacific Ocean. Every day
of the week I receive emails proposing great offers, products, competitions and
services. Some of them I want to take advantage of. But time after time I can't. Why?
Because the web site from where these great offers originate aren't organised to
support purchases from outside their own country. Now I know that Federal Express
and UPS and countless other transport companies can deliver the goods to my front
door (I see their adverts on CNN). I know that I can download software and ebooks
from their web site. So what are the problems? Well, in developing their web site,
no one has taken the trouble to look at how customers outside North America can buy.

The most obvious and first on the list are problems with the order form:
• Zip codes are often mandatory. Like many countries we don't use zip codes here.
• Price, always shown, but often without advising the currency in which it is charged.
• State is often mandatory and you pick it from a pull-down list, great, but no option
for 'no state" offered.
• Only the tolls free number shown. 1-800 numbers can't be called from outside
North America.
• Special offers only available to residents in the US, but only shown in tiny print
and hidden away.

Email offers
It's pretty obvious from an email address, if it's not a .com, where the person is lives.
And if someone has signed up to your email list you will have asked them for their
address. So don't make special offers for Independence Day, Memorial Day and
Thanks Giving to your subscribers living overseas. These holidays are only celebrated
in the US.
Special occasions such as Easter, Fathers and Mothers Days and the like are likely
to be held on quite different dates outside the USA.
Most countries use the metric system for sizes.
Dates such as 12/7/2002 mean 12 July 2002 to most of the English speaking world.
Rather than using numerals for the month, use the word i.e. Dec 7, 2002 so that dates
are clear to everyone.

Language Skills
Did you know that in the 1990 United States Census (the last when language ability was
included), nearly 32 million people (aged over 5 years of age) didn't speak English as
their first language? And that of those 32 million people, nearly 14 million spoke
almost no English.

Perhaps you should consider making your web site available in languages other than
English. By far, the largest number of non-English speakers have Spanish as their
first language. By offering Spanish, your web site can be viewed by nearly 17 million
people living in the US who don't speak English well. And let's not forget the
332 million people with Spanish as their first language (source Ethnologue, 13th
Edition) that live outside the USA.

Other languages, which you might consider, are Chinese, French, Italian and German.
Each of these languages has over a million people, resident in the USA, who have
poor or no English skills. And think of the millions and millions of people outside the
USA who speak these languages. Chinese is the first language of 1,223 million
people, (over a sixth of the World's population). 72 million people have French as
their first language, Italian is spoken by over 37 million people, and German by
98 million people.

Is it difficult to make your web site available in more than one language? Well, no
it's not difficult, is the answer for most web sites. And the cost of translation is
relatively modest; particularly when compared with the huge increase in the potential
market. Translation prices are usually based on the word count. And the number of
words displayed on most web sites are actually quite small. Usually somewhere
between 500 and 1,500 words, which roughly equates to about US$100 to US$300
per language.

The effort to take the resulting pages, written in another language, and display them
on your site is usually no more difficult than adding new pages in English.

And there are a number of things that you can do to keep the cost and effort down.
• Check your site carefully for spelling errors. Especially watch out for horrid homonyns
(those words which read the same, are spelt differently, but have very different
meanings. You know them, words like;
there, their, they're;
its and it's;
who's and whoose;
too, to and two;
site, cite and sight to name a few.
• Keep your language simple, and avoid ambiguities.
• Check the grammar, and then check it again.
• Avoid the use of colloquialisms.
• Choose several professional translation companies and ask them for quotes. If there
are large differences in their prices, ask why.

And if you make regular updates to your web site, most translation companies can
offer a maintenance package.

I hope you've found this article useful.