Forum Moderators: phranque
Hopefully this post gets noticed throuh all of the 'Update Austin' hooplah, here goes:
I am re-building a 5 language site. They currently have a nice splash page with flags, and use some great redirects that effectively kill their 'spiderability'.
I was planning on going the usual 'small flags' route, when one of the staff of the co. mentioned that they had flags before, and didn't like 'em.
Now, bottom line is traffic/leads/roi, so I could sell them on flags if I need to, however I was wondering about the following method:
Would a dropdown option/select box work? AND would the spiders be able to crawl through this?
The site will have a good site map, but I feel that the spiderability of four flags on each and every page would be so much better than relying on the site map...
- mipapage
Flags are a quick very visual (and therefore not very accessible) "button" selector. Also language and country are not exact matches these days.
I prefer the actual language name in that language. Very explicit and easy to recognize one's preference.
For example:
Language names will work well in a dropdown box of course. My preference is a (very) thin nav bar listing language selection. It is unambiguous and unobtrusive.
The drop down box (or a link to a "Table of Languages" page) is better for a large (more than half dozen or so) selection.
I have not seen a problem with SE and drop-down boxes generally.
En Francais
En Espanol
Auf Deutsch
- in the Spanish the "En Espanol" graphic and links are substituted for ones that link to English content and say "In English".
The problem with flags are... which do you use?
There are a heck of a lot of countries where the official language in Spanish - but the flag of Spain isn't terribly revelant for surfers in Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico etc.
Ditto for English - Canada, US, UK which flag are you going to use?
PatrickDeese, I thought you may chime in to this one.
I've used flags and the word in it's native language on some sites, but just the word alone on our design site. Both methods seem to work fine, however with 5 languages, space is getting tight.
The flags as a visual cue are great, and iamlost, they're fine accessibility wise as long as you give them some alt text. Not to mention that the title of the link will likely be 'this page in english', with a lang attribute set to 'en', for example.
Words are great, however I'd have to go with a dropdown, because space is limited; this means I will lose any spider-oriented interlinking-benefit, no?
I know, I know, design for the user first...
Flags are the wrong way to do this unless you're targeting a specific language group in a specific country.
