Developing international websites

Developing international websites without a well-laid-out plan can make the web globalization process disruptive, complex, and expensive. If a company lacks a systematic policy for its international web development and instead creates international sites only as needed, a number of problems can arise.

• Brand inconsistency Creating international sites on an ad hoc basis makes it difficult to maintain a consistent brand identity and at the same time meet locale-specific requirements. Replicating past efforts and ensuring that past standards are met adds to the project’s time, coordination tasks, and cost.

• Technical difficulties Adapting program code and modifying user interface elements and customer input fields (e.g., if the format for addresses, time, and date differs in different locations) is more difficult and less efficient if a company lacks an organization-wide process to ensure a modular website design or if back-end processes are inflexible or incapable of being leveraged across multiple locales.

• Functional difficulties Without a proper plan for developing international sites, companies can run into issues such as how to depict and support various languages and writing systems on their websites, how to account for the text expansion and contraction that results from translating from one language to another, how to account for bidirectional text, etc.

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