How should I manage country-specific sites?

[lee_sufc]

I have managed a UK-based site offering services to all UK-speaking countries.

However, we're now looking at expanding and have since purchased our domain names with the following extensions:

.ie
.com.au
.ca

Our plan is to create new sites as 'sister' companies to our already established UK company.

However, I have no idea how to go forwards with this?

My plan was to create new sites with different layouts etc but the same company name and altered pricing and wording etc to match each country.

Does anyone else here have any experience of doing the same thing?

[httpwebwitch]

yes - you have two options there. You can build separate sites with new layouts etc, or you can have all the sites run from the same code base, where the content is substituted dynamically. There are many ways to do that, but I'd recommend a data-driven solution with in-memory caching of all the content for maximum speed & flexibility.

For the storage of the "translated" phrases, use SQLite or Redis.

"Internationalization" is a well-covered topic in webmastery; it's often shortened to "i18n" so when you're searching for solutions, try searching for that too.

Once your i18n solution is established, you'll have the infrastrcture to to translate your content into other languages too.

[lee_sufc]

Thanks for your prompt reply and excellent advice - will have a look into that!

[phranque]

from a google point of view - here's a good place to start.

Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 [support.google.com]

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Working with multi-regional websites:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]