I have a website that offers a local service. It is completely dynamic, database-driven, with a lot of local, user generated content. This site is:
- Big - About 50k pages.
- Locally targeted - Visitors only care about the content specific to their own location, say within 100 miles
- User generated - most of the local content is posted by users who live nearby
- Dynamic - every page is built on the fly by pulling content from the database
- Paid - Has both a free and a paid membership
- Small team - Run by just a handful of people
For the sake of argument, we could say my site lists all of the widget stores in each town, and lets people post new listings, photos, reviews, discussion, etc. That's completely false but it should give the right flavor.
Right now, the site is only available in the US and Canada. Local content is broken down by state/province, town, and zip/postal code. My goal is to internationalize the business, by creating clone websites targeted at various other countries, starting with let's say the UK, Germany, and a few others -- maybe 5 to start, and eventually 10-20.
I want to come up with a checkist of things that need to be considered for a project like this, and come up with possible approaches/best practices as to how this can task can be accomplished. I'll list what I've thought of so far.... then if you have any tips, pitch them in and maybe we can put together a comprehensive checklist.
Checklist of Issues To Consider:
- Translation - Obviously we'll need the site translated into each language. This could be harder than it sounds due to industry-specific jargon. My plan at this point is to use a freelance website, but perhaps there's a better way.
- Currency and Formatting - Numbers, dates, times, and currencies are all formatted differently. Somehow we'll have to deal with this.
- Domain names - The clones could all be on country-specific domains, like www.example.de/content.htm, they could be on country-specific subdomains, like de.example.com/content.htm, or they could all be on the same domain, as in www.example.com/de/content.htm. What's best-- For clarity? For search engines? For maintenance?
- Localities - Each clone has to have a different set of local regions built in. For instance, the set of regions/states, cities, and postal codes for that country. How do we find and maintain this data?
- Code reuse - I do not want to maintain separate code for different countries. If we have to ftp all our code to a few different servers, that's fine, but I want the codebase for each country to be completely identical so that we can easily make changes.
- Code reuse and languages - Technically, the common approach seems to be to define all words/phrases used on your site into one big language file, and use a different language file for each clone. Are there other approaches?
- Server location - The China version should probably be hosted in China, for example. This will speed up the site for local users, and perhaps help in search engines. How important is this?
- Duplicate Content Penalties - Certain parts of the UK site will be almost identical to the USA site, although the user generated content will differ. Is this likely to result in penalties? Does this depend on which scheme we choose for the url vs. ccTLD domain name vs. subdomain issue mentioned above? Most importantly, I don't want duplicate content on a clone site to hurt my original site in any way.
- Support - We'll need to hire customer service reps who are fluent in these languages. Right now, they only speak English.
- SEO - Depending on whether you differentiate using URL vs. ccTLD domain name vs. subdomain, SEO issues will be very different. My example.com domain has thousands of backlinks -- if I create example.co.uk, does that all go to waste? I assume it does. Am I better off with uk.example.com? Either way, we probably need to try to get links from websites in the correct language for each country. Tricky again, since we don't speak those languages.
- Ecommerce - We accept Paypal, Visa and Mastercard. This is fine in the US -- but is this a reasonable thing to do all around the world? Regardless, we'll need to figure out a way to bill people in their own currency.
- Database - Should we have a separate database for each country, or keep everything in one big database? If servers are located in different countries, we'll probably need separate databases. But in that case, we'll still need a way to consolidate certain tasks all into a central database, for instance to process membership upgrades. In other words, we want to keep a single admin interface -- we don't want to have to login to 5 different admin interfaces each day to deal with all the daily tasks that came up in each of the 5 different countries separately.
- Geotargetting - When someone types in example.com I want to redirect them to the right place. There are a few approaches to this -- redirect automatically based on IP, give a choice on the first visit and remember their choice with a cookie, or send them directly to the USA site (which is the most popular) but have links at the top where they can find their own local version of the site. Is cloaking an issue to worry about here? I'd guess not, but I don't know.
Most of these questions are hypothetical -- in the end I'll have to answer them myself, because you don't know enough specifics. But, generally, can you think of anything I'm missing? Any major omissions, objections, suggestions, or otherwise?
What experiences do you have with internationalizing your sites?
