Global by Design

A global gateway doesn’t have to be fancy. In fact, it shouldn’t be fancy.
It should be as easy to understand as a stop sign. Form and function and nothing else.
You don’t want people getting confused, waiting for animation to load, or just missing it altogether. This happens all the time.
The fashion house Céline sure keeps [...]

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The Visit Korea tourism web site offers up a global gateway that’s difficult to ignore:

I like it. The languages are presented in the native scripts. The user has to select one before entering the site. Most of all, I like that the languages aren’t hidden behind a pull-down menu.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve written about global gateways – those landing pages and header elements that companies use to direct visitors to localized web sites.
I came across one that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time — it’s the home page of a promotion Hyatt Hotels ran several months ago.

The site is [...]

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Does this icon say “language” to you?
It doesn’t to me.
But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.
I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that [...]

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It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world.
As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.
Om Malik recently reported some key stats from [...]

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For years I’ve been preaching the importance of the “global gateway” — the elements that Web sites use to seamlessly direct Web users to their localized Web sites and content, such as this splash global gateway:

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the [...]

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Web form usability expert Luke Wroblewski provides a very handy article on the challenges of developing Web input forms that work in various countries.
Data input and output is where Web localization projects often sink or swim. And Web forms can give a global marketing director night sweats.
Luke stresses that if you can identify the user’s [...]

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Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.
This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.
I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such [...]

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My second Lionbridge Webinar is scheduled for June 3rd at 1 pm EST and you can register for it here.
The topic is global navigation — why it’s so important and how to improve upon it. I wrote an ebook about this topic two years ago. Since then, geolocation and language negotiation have become more commonly [...]

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The Lionbridge webinar yesterday has been archived for those of you who couldn’t make it. You can register to listen to the call at the Lionbridge site.
And mark your calendars for June 3rd, when I will host a second webinar, also sponsored by Lionbridge, to discuss the many aspects of global navigation — from splash [...]

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