Global network opens great possibilities to businesses. If you want to sell a certain product online, there is no need to limit your target consumers by only one country. Engaging and responsive web-design is going to help your site work for the global audience in case of correct promotion. Let’s see what are the key aspects to pay attention at when creating a global-friendly website.
1. International Standards Rule the World
A website branding and needs of target audience should create a perfect harmony. If you select colors they should appeal to most of available cultures, if you upload fonts, consider the diversity of text strings that different languages have. The ability to meet the capabilities of various browsers is one more important aspect to take into account. Different browsers have different rendering engines, compatible plugins, and other peculiarities which make the web-pages look in a different way depending on the type of a browser. The good solution here is to choose a clean and neutral design which will correspond both the standards and tastes of most modern users.
When you create an international design, consider how different languages impact the look of definite pages. Some short phrases in English may look much longer in other languages so they can wrap onto the next line on the small screens. All of this should be tested to make sure that every little phrase or a long sentence looks properly on different displays.
Speaking about fonts, one can say they should also be chosen depending on the specific target audience. For instance, if you suppose your visitors to be the residents of a European country such as France, Italy, England or Germany, you can choose Calibri, Verdana or Arial types. For Indo-European target users choose Times CE or Palatino CE. For Bulgarian, Russian or Ukrainian languages it is required to choose Cyrillic characters. Arabic, Japanese or other Asian languages will need other special fonts, such as zh-Hans, and so on. However, if you don’t want an additional layer to appear every time the site is loading, choose only one language to be displayed on the start, English is the most widespread and understandable one for citizens of almost every country of the world.
2. Speed Matters
The best user experience is usually provided not only through simple navigation, rich content and responsiveness, but also through high performance of the website. Of course you can’t predict what hardware is applied by every user, but you can select an international hosting platform to ensure the easy “lift” of the website. Try to use special services that will configure a web traffic. Some of them have specific options which can configure servers to identify which of them is the closest one to the target user.
Bandwidth is one more essential aspect to consider for a global-friendly website. There are some countries that doesn’t have strong internet connections so websites can load pretty slowly. To solve this question, it is better to reduce and cache JavaScript to minify the amount of HTTP requests and the volume of files. This will help a website to load faster.
Images should obviously be optimized to be “light” enough to save the high speed of website loading. If you want to display high-resolution images for retina screen be sure to use media queries. However, if you are not sure that most of your target users have fast internet connection and you can’t upload both lower and higher resolutions, then try to apply only small and lower-resolution pictures. Tips for image optimization are as follows:
1. Prefer international image formats such as jpg, png or gif.
2. Don’t encode text in images, better use web fonts.
3. Incorporate CSS3 effects.
4. Use only necessary pictures.
5. Choose the finest settings for every image format.
3. User Experience Prevails
Even if your broadband connection equals 100 Mb per second and you use a modern device for designing your international website, it is not a guarantee that you provide an excellent user experience to your visitors. The best variant is to look for average bandwidth which matches the most of targeted countries. Research global web trends and test your website on particular browsers and devices to get an idea on how they load there. Try to find out what browsers are mostly used in a certain target country and make your website “compatible” with it, check if your site looks good in that particular browser.
If you don’t have the possibility to test the site on a few different devices, you can use special tools which simulate different screen resolutions, prompt the necessary bandwidth for website loading, test the design elements and prompt the required corrections.
4. Content is a King
Any global-friendly website should be a multilingual one. To provide a localized content based on international brands is the priority task. Every target user should feel that content is prepared specifically for his tastes, interests and culture. Use a full-featured CMS to easily publish texts translated into several different languages. Of course it is better to hire native speakers to translate a site into various languages, but if it isn’t possible, you can utilize a human translation platform instead of using machine-translation.
Conclusion:
An internationally based website is sure to be a “mighty” and profitable project if you do everything right. After you make sure your global website is perfect, the only thing that’s left is to promote it and get ultimate results.
