Optimizing Your Site for a Global Audience

Featured article by Jennifer Livingston, Independent Technology Author

Your company website represents everything about your brand – mission and goals, products and services, trustworthiness and professionalism. If you are serious about building a brand that is recognized worldwide and is proudly supported by not only the company staff but its intended consumers as well, then optimizing a website fit for a global audience should be of utmost priority and a benefactor of your personal and financial resources. Here are six ways on how you can achieve that and more.

Build From Scratch

Obviously, this will take you on a much longer and more laborious path than, say, using WordPress. Utilizing the right components during the initial design process, however, enables you to adjust and translate your website more conveniently and under minimal costs. CCS, or Cascading Style Sheets, for instance enables you to keep HTML elements from its design counterparts. This tool is crucial as your scripts become longer and you take on more elements. Changing a specific design attribute on several HTML elements manually can take a tediously long time and too much unnecessary effort is expended.

Use Proper Extensions

If you have the budget, create language-specific or country-specific websites bearing the correct domain extensions, such as .ph, .uk., and .nz. If this is not an option, an alternative solution is to buy different domain extensions and then have it linked to a sub-directory. Keep in mind that different domain name extensions will cost relatively different prices. For instance, .AF, which is for Afghanistan, will cost more than $100 while .EU will cost less than $20. Avoid impulse buying every extension you can afford. Instead, buy a few dozen domain names and then add on as you go.

Use Google Translate

If you lack the resources to build a local website for every country or language you want to bring your brand to, adding Google Translate is the next viable step to ensure that foreign visitors can read your content in their own native language. In fact, more than half a million businesses use Google Translate or a similar translation software. This enables businesses to serve their respective customers in multiple countries accurately, from responding to customer support email messages to displaying essential content.

Optimize Loading Time

Let’s face it, nobody sticks around for more than 10 seconds for a website or webpage to load. If your site fails to fully load its content within the first five seconds, there is a good chance your visitor leaves and never comes back. In fact, 47 percent of consumers expect a webpage to load in less than three seconds. Page loading time is apparently an essential aspect of running any website. It affects the user experience and the company’s bottom line. Strike a balance between good aesthetic design, rich functionality, and page loading time.

Consider Cultural Differences

Successfully catering to a global audience requires you to be mindful of the cultural differences that exist between borders. Some users will have a proclivity for well-defined structures and information while others prefer a more intuitive and image-rich design. Take for example the design distinctions between McDonald’s sites. The German site is laid out in a near tabular format while China’s version of the site is more vibrant and filled with animations in every corner and page.

Work on Your Payment System

Many business owners and webmasters make the mistake of thinking major payment options, like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal will cater every customer on the planet. This is far from the case. In the United Kingdom alone, 11 percent of citizens do not have any bank accounts to their name. Meanwhile, a large demographic of German shoppers are championing ELV bank transfers as their preferred payment method.

Going global is a long-term commitment rather than a week-long project. You’ll need to plan and prepare carefully and address any technical issues early on so you can save your business a world of pain and losses in the future.