Having a ‘global website’ provides businesses with a tool to take their products / services to a global market with the opportunity for business growth and increased sales. But is it just a case of translating some of the copy or buying as many country specific domain names as possible? We have worked on several global and multi language sites over the past couple of years with briefs ranging from increasing brand and product awareness, selling to an international audience and making a campaign accessible to an international market. Going ‘global’ can provide big opportunities but there are also lots of things to consider. So here are a few of the important things to think about when going worldwide.

1. One size doesn’t fit all
Firstly you need to consider whether you want one website with a global reach or one site with multiple country and language versions. It is important to remember that each market will be different, from the obvious things such as language and currency through to the less tangible differences of culture, lifestyle and ethics and as a result each markets requirements from you as a company and your products / services will be different. But without a doubt the biggest consideration is language. According to Feedgrids ‘people who don't speak English as their first language, or at all, are six times less likely to purchase from an English-only site.’

That said to create a website and roll it out across a number of countries and languages doesn’t automatically mean success. Localisation is the key word when it comes to globalisation and HSBC certainly got it right with their strapline ‘The worlds local bank’. They realised that for a global corporation to be successful they needed to understand and work at a local level. Relate this back to your product or service and how this translates online. Should all your products / services  be available in every country? Will certain products be more popular in certain regions and if so how will this affect the hierarchy of information on each site? What information should you provide on your site? Can product / service USPs and information, terms and conditions and delivery information be standardised or will each country or region have their own requirements? I assume it is the latter and therefore key research, a flexible site and hierarchy of information will help you to achieve this.

Design is also a key consideration and depending on the markets you are looking to enter and the product or services you offer, you may need to look at your brand and site design. Colours that mean one thing in one culture do not always mean the same thing worldwide. The tone of voice you use aswell as the products / service names will also need to be researched, the last thing you want is to enter a new market where the name of your product is an offensive word  - unless that is your USP?! The best example of this was the Jif to Cif rebrand in 2001 which was due to the fact that any non English speaking person struggled to say the word Jif and having a brand that no one can pronounce isn’t a great sales strategy.

2. Single or multiple domains
There are two main options: Country specific domains e.g. .co.uk .fr are good for natural search and also valuable if you want to align yourself with that country or position yourself as being based in a certain place. This is a an approach that Amazon have taken. However it can be costly and difficult to obtain domain names in some countries. It may also be hard to obtain the same domain name for each country and may dilute the consistency of your brand. It can also be costly as well as time consuming to manage multiple domains.

The alternative is using a global .com domain name with country specific extensions e.g. com/fr. Many sites take this approach including Mini and Apple. This way you only have one domain to manage and ensures consistency across all of your countries / languages. This is the approach that we have taken in the past on sites such as Skechers and Ultra Motor.

3. Getting from A to B
Once you have agreed on your domain set up and if you have opted for a global .com address, the next thing to think about is how to get users to the relevant country or language site. This can be done through IP matching where country IP addresses are matched against a specific version of your site. This service is available through various providers such as GeoLite country. It isn’t guaranteed to be 100% accurate and there will also be issues if users have IP addresses registered to other countries. So to support this a language / country selector should be displayed prominently enabling users to  change their country / language options if required. Although Apple do not appear to have IP matching in place, the country selector on the footer of every page is very prominent aswell as a very clear country selection page. Dyson appear to be using IP matching and also have a clear, prominent country selector located in the footer of every page.

4. Should you show the flag?
Should you localise your site by country and or language? This really depends on budgets and which markets you are looking to cover. If you want to cover all ‘English’ speaking countries then having an English language version of your site would be more cost effective than have a site for each country that speaks English. However bear in mind those subtle differences in language, spelling, currency and whether an ‘English speaking’ country would class themselves as ‘English’ or speaking ‘English’. Localising your site by country is the other option but also bear in mind that some countries such as Canada have multiple languages. However this is easily overcome (although not the most cost effective solution) by having  two language sites under one country. There is no right answer to this one and really does depend on the markets you are or looking to operate in, budgets etc. Some, like British Airways, cover all options. We have used both routes in the past, but either way ensure that it is set up in a way that will allow you to make changes as your requirements change.

5. Translation - Traduction
Next on the list is how to localise the copy on you site. It’s not enough just to translate the copy, you need to make sure that:
A. The translated copy makes sense in that language
B. That it reflects the brand, positioning and tone of voice of your company
C. Sells the relevant features to that market.

Ideally you should look at using a translation company or contacts / colleagues that can provide a translation service for you and have a good understanding of your company and the culture of the language they are translating into. A cheaper alternative and for situations where brand values, tone of voice are less important such as user generated content, Google Translator and Babelfish are good, cost effective options. We are currently integrating Google Translator into two client sites which will enable all of their user generated content to be translated across all languages.  

6. Search Engine Marketing
A quick mention on SEO and PPC. Keywords in one country are not necessarily the keywords that customers will search with in another. Achieving good natural search is dependent on you understanding what customers are searching for and what the competition are doing in that country. If you do run PPC campaigns then you will need to consider your PPC strategy for each country. Search engine popularity varies from country to country as does the meaning of words.

7. One database and CMS
On top of all the benefits that come with the ability to manage the content on your site you should also look to have one CMS that controls the pages of all of your country / language sites, keeping everything in one place and making it more cost effective and easier to manage. The same goes for your database, it will be easier to manage if it is all in one place and you can set filters for country specific reports.

8. Get your customers to the finish line
If you are offering a product or service that customers can pay for through your website then make sure all payment options are covered. Arguably too many options may confuse people, but definitely make sure you use a 3rd party payment handler such as SagePay which offers payment in multiple currencies and an ecommerce platform such as PayPal. Or one day and depending on what you are selling you may even be able to use the Facebook micro payment service. Whatever you use it is essential that the payment options are convenient and accessible, safe and secure. The last thing you want is to put your customer off at the final hurdle.

So a few final thoughts:

• One step at a time. Don’t try and recreate everything on your main site into multiple local versions all in one go.
• Research each market and make decisions about what is relevant to and expected by that market.
• Five sites instead of one is very different so keep it manageable. Functionality such as blogs that need to be updated on a regular basis and require moderation may be best left to a later date.

In recent weeks I seem to be getting more and more briefs landing on my desk, requesting "web 2.0" graphics or a "Glassy effect". I find it interesting that this language has seeped into to the mainstream, however, this is a prime example of clients jumping allowing their personal preference to get in the way of their audience's preference. This way of thinking relegates the design process to simply applying a style and colouring in-between the lines and doesn't consider the design as communication.

Design should never be a style or a fashion rolled out and applied to a wireframe. Design is about relevant effective communication with your target market. It is often forgotten that the design is the first experience a user will have with your website. Before the user has read a word, they have already scanned over the page, taken in the visual language and made an instant decision on whether or not this is the right sort of site to be able to find what they are looking for. This is where good design will stand out and help guide the user through the page, without them even knowing. For the best design does not announce itself to its audience but is accepted and engaged with without them even realising.

Here at codegent, once we have identified the audience we want to communicate with and the key message which we want to leave them with we begin intensive research into that audience. We look at competitors and then look at other brands which our target audience engage in. I have written before about the crucial nature of knowing your audience but I can't stress this enough. You need to know everything about your audience, you need to know where they go online, whether they use social media, whether they access their email through a blackberry, the kind of visual language are they used to, what sort of symbols they associate with value. By getting to know your audience, you can learn the best visual language to communicate to them with .

Once we have collected this information we sit down and analyse the visual language. In the simplest terms this is identifying themes in typographic styles, colours used, style of photography and how these graphic elements are brought together. Once this visual language has been deconstructed and the meaning of all of these symbols has been identified, we can use this visual syntax to be able to create the right message for the right audience. This can then be used to guide the audience through the website, getting them to take the path we want them to follow .

This semiotic approach is at the heart of all good design. By taking this approach all design decisions become quantifiable and it removes personal preference. As much as the client's wife may want to make it "glassy", if the researched visual language doesn't support this, then it is the wrong decision to make.

2010 is certainly not the first to be touted as the ‘Year of the Mobile Web’ but with the recent launch of the Nexus One and the likely war that will be waged between Google and Apple, it may be the first to actually go some way towards fulfilling its billing.

Currently, 1 in 7 minutes of media consumed in the UK is via a mobile device of some description. That number is set to rise with the end of the iPhone/O2 exclusivity deal, the addition of the Nexus One to the market and the inevitable clamouring amongst the remaining handset manufacturers to catch up. Mobile specific content is no longer a differentiator for companies; it is fast becoming a necessity as users move away from their PCs.

As we become more proficient at sifting through the mass of information at our fingertips and with the evolving development of the semantic web, we are starting to browse for information less and scan for it more. The ‘Smartphoners’ are the biggest ‘scanners’ of us all as they hunt out that quick hit of data; be it social updates, news, directions or very specific information. More and more user journeys follow the pattern of;

search engine > top listed page > back to search engine > another top listed page

As a result, as smartphone market share increases, bounce rate percentages across the land will inevitably rise as users who aren’t finding what they need quickly head off in search of it elsewhere.

The challenge we will face as designers, developers, UXers and strategists is how to overcome this behaviour and capture a user’s interest before they head off into the virtual sunset. The type of thinking that we need to do as creators of content for the mobile web is no different to that which we need to do for the desktop web; there is just less margin for error.

Think in pixels - Information Architecture needs to reflect the hardware that the audience use and this will increasingly mean a screen resolution of 480 x 320. This means cut down copy, reduce layers of navigation and think about content weighting – what are the most important of all the important things you are trying to say? What about font size? Can you read 10pt Verdana easily on an iPhone? Do those beautiful, detailed icons mean anything to the guy scanning your site on his Palm Pre from a train?

Clarity of message – Keep it short, and to the point.

Take SEM by the balls– It is unlikely that a mobile user will get past the first 1 or 2 pages of Google results so to be in with a chance of getting that click-through you need to be running intelligent PPC campaigns (Google mobile still makes room for sponsored links both on its mobile site and iPhone application), have outstanding SEO or go niche – ideally a combination of the 3. Interestingly, Google's mobile search also has room for a couple of real time results so all the more reason to engage with your audience on the social web.

It’s all in the content – I know we always bang on about this, but it is with good reason. Why are your users coming to your site and how do they generally find you? Look at your analytics; what are they looking for and how can you better deliver this information? Smartphone users are less inclined to browse and if they aren’t quickly seeing what they are looking for you may as well wave them goodbye.

The smartphone world is the antidote to the big budget, FWA world of 27” iMacs and megabytes of Flash. It is all about simplification of your message and real emphasis on what audiences want. It is a world where vanity must make way for clarity of message and ultimately one that requires us as an agency to really earn our fees in the field of usability, audience expertise and successful user conversion.

Here are a few of the current heroes from the world of the mobile web;

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ - easy to use and the right mix of content. Most importantly it doesn't feel like a stripped back version of the full site and of course there is the iPlayer.
• http://touch.facebook.com/ - Everything from the full site, cut up into bite-sized pieces.
• http://mobile.flightstats.com/go/Mobile/home.do - a simple site that helps you find crucial information when you need it.
• http://onetrip.org/ - more of a web app than a site but worth mentioning as they have consciously gone minimal with no GFX to speed up mobile load time.
• http://m.google.com/ - everything you can do on the Google you can do here from searching to mail.

I often get asked 'what makes a website design great?' So I thought I would put together what I feel are the 3 most important steps.

Step 1: Know your audience
Step 2: Know your audience
Step 3: Know your audience

This may sounds rather repetitive; however every design decision must come back to what your audience wants. So how do you get to know your audience?

1. Define Your Audience
   I have lost count of the number of times a client has returned a creative brief to us with the audience section filled out with “equal split male & female, Aged 8 – 80”. That’s basically everyone except the family pet.
   
   Obviously, from a communications point of view this isn’t very useful. You talk to an 8 year old girl, very differently to her 80 year old grandfather. What we do here at codegent is try to break down this age demographic by looking at the reasons they will come to the site; the 8 year old needs help with her homework and her grandfather is part of a lobby group looking for information.
2. Audience Interviews
   This step is too often forgotten in the design process; however nothing clears out the assumptions of a designer faster than a 5 minute chat with their audience. Ideally this is best done with a large sample size of random members of the target market but, as we all know, budget constraints don’t always make this possible. When this isn’t possible, we always make sure that we chat to at least a couple of people that fall into our target audience. It is an essential sanity check for all of our thinking.
3. Research
   Once we know who will be coming to the site, we will go out and find out everything we can about them. How much time they spend at a computer, which sites they visit every day, what sort of things are they comfortable doing online. All of these questions (and many more) help us build up a profile of the target audience. It is from this profile that we are able to establish the most effective visual language with which to communicate with them.

Once we have gathered all of this information and come to our conclusions, we present this back to our clients, as this will be the reference point we are going to justify all of our decisions back to when we are working on the art direction & information structure of the work being produced. All of this “design work” has to be done before we can power up photoshop and get stuck into the visual phase.