![]() | ||||||||
![]() | ![]() | |||||||
![]() | ![]() | |||||||
![]() | ||||||||
![]() | ||||||||
![]() | ||||||||
![]() |
This article is available for free reprints and distribution. If you decide to use the article, please, out of courtesy, send us an email to let us know. | |||||||
![]() | ||||||||
Making a Web Site Available to the World | |||
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? The
most obvious and first on the list are problems with the order form: Email
offers Language
Skills 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: 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. Copyright
(c) 2002 Grant McNamara, All Rights Reserved. This article may be freely distributed
and published. If you wish to publish the article, out of courtesy, please email
me and advise the url. | |||