Forum Moderators: open
Bol,
not necessarily sub domains, as these would be better served for content distribution accross a large site.
Obviously there are 4 ways of delivering alternate languages.
1. Sub directories of a site
2. Sub domains off a domain-name.
3. Different domain
4. Proxy loaded serving, detecting browser/OS/ISP language compatibility
1. i would recommend for the least experienced of web designers, who have small sites, small budgets, but can see the value of alternate sub-directory strutures targetted at various non-native languages.
2. & 3. i've heard and seen many arguments, about which is best. I think unique / language independant urls, win hands down, not only can you kw load the url too start with, but, domain-name and host-name are considered quite different by the search engines and directories.
4. Unless, you are dealing with big pipelines, and a few million, this is definetly the big time, both in cost, skills required to do, and reasons for needing to do it.
[edited by: heini at 10:35 am (utc) on June 6, 2002]
Definitely, Caine. Gives you all the possibilities at hand to promote for all languages, obtaining listings, going for local languages, targeted linking...
>Proxy loaded serving, detecting browser/OS/ISP language compatibility
Interesting. Where do you see the advantages in this approach?
[edited by: heini at 11:08 am (utc) on June 6, 2002]
by and large a user is coming to a site in the language they expect to recieve...because they clicked a link in that language, or labelled as going to that language...because they used a search result for sites in that language...or because they heard or read about a site in that language
allowing users to change language after they arrive can be very useful...trying to guess what they want before they download the page is not
but it is possible and easy to get completely wrong...so there is a mind set which sees it as the ideal solution
Definitely. I can vouch for that. Remember that only 28% of all Europeans understand English at all. Even in the 15 rich European Union member states, that figure is no more than 41% Even people who speak three or more languages are likely to try their own first, as long as they think they stand a reasonable chance of finding a decent answer to their query.
I have 14 identical sites up in 14 languages. The distribution of visitors by language will give you an idea. Note: The sites offer a tourist service in Sweden, which is the local market and thus disproportionate in this case. Americans constitute the bulk of the visitors to the English site. Each site has the prime keyword(s) in the url. Some are local, some are dot-coms. All place extremely well, both in major engines such as Google and in local engines and directories.
English: 36%
Swedish: 28%
German: 8%
Italian: 5%
French: 4%
Spanish: 4%
Finnish: 4%
Norwegian: 3%
Danish: 2%
Dutch: 2%
Russian: 1%
Polish: 1%
Estonian: 1%
Hungarian <1%
That's 64% non-English speaking visitors. Food for thought.
