If you desire the ability to effectively communicate with an audience that is limited in their English proficiency, you have to achieve and maintain an effective web presence. You can utilize social media sites to expand your presence and site traffic. Your website should ensure highly proficient translation, free accessibility to the desired population, and a fluid ease of use. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind as you design your own bilingual website.
Language & Culture
If you’re looking to build an effective bilingual website, you have to know that you should focus your efforts towards catering to the language preferences of your targeted population. If you equip your page with automatic translation machines, you won’t be able to produce a reliable and consistent translation tool. This will discourage users from returning, and be counterproductive to the goal of your website. Provide the translations yourself to assure quality and accuracy.
Not only is your goal clear and concise language communication, but you will also need to take into account the culture of your prospective audience. The overall experience of your page should be culturally relevant to the targeted culture. You must find a way to achieve an emotional connection to your audience. Providing images and color schemes that resonate with the community you are trying to reach will be helpful in creating a sense of home and comfort on your page.
URL & Access Strategies
To successfully build website traffic, you must design your page in such a way that it is easily accessible. The use of proper search engine optimization tactics will help enable speedy access. You can use a link such as “En espanol” to redirect the user to the spanish translation of your website (or whatever language in which you are providing services).
When setting up your URL, keep these simple tips in mind. You should make sure to use a dedicated URL that can stand alone for marketing purposes. The main URL can be used to redirect the user to their desired language translation. If you so choose, you can have several different language translations set up for your web page. Just remember that it’s in your best interest to make sure the translations are correct and reliable.
General Rules of Thumb
Here are just a few general and simple rules of thumb to keep in mind while working through your website’s design. Avoid confusion on your page by not linking languages side by side or above and below each other. Just stick to simple and separate. Make sure your links to other languages are easy to follow. If the user is unable to find what they are looking for quickly, they will simply look somewhere else. Lastly, if you are providing several different language translation links, you may want to set up some sort of content page to foster clearer navigation.