Anyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe can access your page, which means you need to design with the world in mind. Of course, you can’t please everyone. But you can design your website so it’s easy to adapt for other languages, other cultures. By thinking global from the start, the act of localising your website later on becomes a whole lot easier.

Content Is King

Visitors won’t keep coming back to you website for a nice layout and appealing colour scheme alone. The old adage that ‘content is king’ shouldn’t be forgotten amongst all the bells and whistles of an aesthetically pleasing design.

Having a website in English means that around a quarter of the Earth’s population can read your website (and the vast majority of them will have English only as  a second language). So if you’re serious about making international inroads online, the time will probably come when you need to start thinking about converting your content for the global masses.

The world has many different writing systems and scripts, with the likes of Arabic, Greek, Russians and Chinese having quite distinct characters in their respective alphabets. With that mind, the need to use Unicode is imperative if you’re planning to develop your website for other markets.

Unicode is a standard numeric representation of characters that can currently be used for over 90 scripts, and has a repertoire of over 100,000 characters. More specifically, UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode that most programmers will be familiar with.

It is the best option when creating websites for international markets, as it allows you to use characters from countless writing systems. All the standard web design applications facilitate Unicode documents, allowing you to choose the language of your pages and insert appropriate HTML tags within the code.

Colour Mix-up

The colour scheme is a key consideration on any website – in fact it may be one of the first things many web designers think about.

But whilst colour preference is subjective and you can’t please everyone, colours also have cultural significance and it’s perhaps worth thinking about this before settling on a scheme.

For example, black denotes ‘death’ in many western cultures, but not so in eastern cultures, where white is the signifying colour for this. Similarly, red represents ‘danger’ or ‘passion’ in North America and Western Europe, but it can mean ‘purity’ in India. Furthermore, Orange is often used to represent autumn (fall) or Halloween in many regions around the world, but in Northern Ireland, it holds religious connotations for Protestants.

This doesn’t mean you should build a different website for each of your target markets, it just means it pays to be wary of culture and colour.

Graphics & Imagery

This depends on how you would like your website to look. A liberally-clothed lady on a website isn’t all that offensive to western audiences, but it may be a major letdown if you’re targeting more conservative cultures. So you may want to reconsider having such imagery on your website.

The same applies to any potentially divisive graphics, whether it relates to gender, religion, age…anything.

But there is a more practical consideration to be made when thinking about your graphics. Believe it or not, there are still many countries across the world without high-speed internet access, which means fancy Flash animations or other bandwidth-sapping graphics may preclude millions of potential visitors from accessing your pages. To circumvent this, one option is to have a simple HTML version for those on slower connections, and another version for those lucky enough to have superfast web access on tap.

Design & Layout

It’s not the end of the world if you have to develop separate templates to cater for other languages, but it will save you a little hassle if your navigation bar is in the same place across all your websites. A horizontal navigation bar will go some way towards aiding this consistency process.

These are just the very basics of creating a cross-cultural website.

The key point to remember when designing a website is that it is for international audiences and adopting a global mindset from the outset will stand you in good stead.

Happy designing and good luck!