By avoiding them, you avoid stepping into any number of politically sensitive issues.

Nevertheless, companies love to use flags on their web sites.

And sometimes the use of flags can result in some rather curious implementations.

Case in point: I recently came across the global gateway for Swiss Air and saw something that can best be conveyed via video:

Did you see the “flashing” flag?

I’d be curious to know if residents of the UK and Ireland would be bothered by this hybrid flag. Perhaps it’s not a big deal, but the flashing alone made this flag stand apart from all others. Frankly, it looks silly.

The flashing flag is also included in the pull-down menu, as demonstrated below:

Had Swiss Air simply avoided flags in the first place, it would have avoided this issue altogether.

Flags can be troublesome. When it doubt, leave them out.

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 it simple:

In one page you know exactly what languages the site supports and there is no chance you’ll miss it. I certainly didn’t.

What other global gateways exhibit such minimalism?

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.

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 still live here.

It’s a visually engaging global gateway and I love the many translations of “welcome” in the center of the page. Unfortunately, this gateway demonstrates three practices companies should avoid repeating. I’ll call them rules.

Rule #1: Global gateways should place function above beauty

I’ve got nothing against a great-looking web page. But job number one is getting users to where they want to go, and quickly. In the case of Hyatt, all those “welcome” languages are engaging, but they’re not clickable, something I learned when I tried clicking on “Bienvenido” and then “Benvenuti.” They’re just design elements.

The only clickable links on the entire page are at the very top and the very bottom of the page, which leads me to the next rule.

Rule #2: To paraphrase Steve Krug, don’t make users think about what language or country they need to select

The global gateway should require no thought whatsoever. But let’s say I speak German and I land on this page. I could click the “Europe” link at the bottom of the page or I could click the “Deutsch” link at the top of the page. Which do I choose? The very fact that I have to think about it means the design is flawed.

What’s interesting here is that if you select “Europe” a list of available languages will appear below it. Why not just have those languages there all along? Perhaps that would have helped. I think so. But the fact that there are two selections that the user must decide between is inherently bad design.

Rule #3: Don’t pretend you speak languages that you don’t

What’s really unfortunate about Hyatt’s gateway is that some of the “welcome” languages are not supported by localized web pages — such Greek and Slovenian. This could give visitors the impression you support their language when you really don’t. Not a great idea. Managing user expectations is critical, particularly when it comes to localized content.

Fortunately, the Hyatt gateway was temporary.

What do you think? Was I being too hard on the site? And are there any rules you would add?

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 this one should be it. I find that this looks like a floppy disk (and, yes, I’m aware that there is an entire generation of computer users out there who don’t even know what a floppy disk looks like).

If I were to vote for an international icon, I would vote for a generic globe icon. Companies such as Panasonic, Dow Corning, and Microsoft have used a globe icon to denote either language or country/region (or both).

Other companies use tiny maps, such as John Deere and Caterpillar.

I prefer the globe, but either will do the trick.

What do you think?

PS: I just discovered that I wrote about the need for a standard icon way back in 2004. I preferred the globe icon even back then.

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 Facebook’s global expansion efforts. Among them:

• Facebook is available in 43 languages and is in the process of being translated into another 60 languages.
• 40 percent of Facebook users are not using English.
• 25,000 volunteers helped translate Facebook into Turkish last year, and there are now 9 million Turkish-language users signed up for Facebook.

Even though only 43 languages are available now, if you add the Facebook Translations application (which i really recommend doing if you’re into this sort of thing), you’ll see the other 60 languages in the pipeline — many of which look pretty much good to go.

Here’s what the Translations pull-down menu looks like:

So many languages my computer is lacking for fonts.

It’s a very safe bet to say that Facebook will support more than 100 languages a year from now.

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the Web sites of alcoholic beverages: the age gateway.

Here is the age gateway of Budweiser:

The age gateway has to be one of the most useless gateways ever devised — and certainly one of the most frustrating to use.

For starters, every beer maker seems to have its own take on how best to design the gateway. The gateways are usually Flash-based and typically difficult to use. What I end up doing is simply entering 01/01/1971 just to get through it as quickly as possible.

I would predict that the logs of Budweiser feature an inordinately high number of people born on the first day of the year.

But the reason why I’m mentioning the age gateway here is two-fold. In the case of Budweiser (and most competitive Web sites), the age gateway comes before the global gateway.

Once you get past the “virtual bouncer” and into the Budweiser site, in order to find your specific country or language Web site, you must do a bit of searching. Here is the buried link:

This link takes you to this page:

According to Budweiser, “great taste knows no boundaries.” But great global design apparently does run up against a few boundaries. For a non-English speaker, getting to this gateway is no trivial task.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t place the age gateway before the global gateway.

Let the Web user find his or her localized Web site before you present your virtual bouncer. This is particularly important because dates are not presented in the same format in all countries. By directing the user to his or her local site first, you can then present your age gateway in the correct date format.

And, as my brother pointed out, different countries have different drinking ages — yet another reason to put the global gateway before the age gateway.

Now for the second point I wanted to make regarding age gateways.

Not long ago I came across a new product known as the Beertender. It’s a sort of mini-keg fridge designed specifically for Heineken.

Take a moment to visit www.beertender.com and you’ll first encounter this splash global gateway:

It is not until you select a country that you arrive at an age gateway.To my knowledge, Heineken is the first company to place its global gateway ahead of the age gateway!

If you select the French site, you’ll arrive at a very simple yes/no age gateway:

But because American lawyers are not as freewheeling as the French in regards to underage drinking, here is the American age gateway:

But even here you’ll find that Beertender makes significant usability improvements. Instead of asking the user to input dates, you simply select the dates displayed on the screen. It’s remarkably faster to get through.

So it’s nice to see Beertender not only put its global gateway ahead of its age gateway, but also support localized and user-friendly age gateways. I hope the other beer makers of the world take notice.

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 country before presenting the form, you’re in much better shape, because you can then provide a fully localized form. And this is why global navigation is so incredibly important to successful Web localization. If you can help your customer find his or her country Web site right from the start, everything else gets so much easier (for you and your customer).

Here’s the article.

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 a picky thing. I work with numerous multinationals that now host their American Web sites at the .us domain — and their global Web sites at the .com domain. This makes perfect sense.

And yet Google, in applying the American visual to the .com site, perpetuates this idea that .com is a uniquely American URL.

Granted, Google doesn’t show residents of France and Germany and other countries this visual even if they input Google.com; Google uses geolocation to serve up localized Web pages based on the Web user’s location.

I understand Google has a dilemma on its hands. Because most Americans believe .com to be an American domain, Google might appear unpatriotic if it didn’t continue this .com/4th of July tradition.

But what I would like to see happen is Google launching a .us search engine. Not only would Google benefit from having another country country code to monetize, but those multinationals that currently host .us Web sites would be rewarded for their efforts.

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 used and an increasing number of companies have launched splash global gateways — like Intel, which launched its first splash gateway just last week.

If I have time, I also plan to talk about IDNs — internationalized domain names — and why companies will need to register them (and may in fact be required to register them).

See you on June 3rd!

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 global gateways, to country codes, to geolocation. I’ll include lots of real-world examples.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, the splash global gateway is a landing page that allows visitors to self-select their language or country (or both). Based on the 2008 Web Globalization Report Card, more than 30% of the 225 sites reviewed now use a splash global gateway.

But there is a wide variance in the execution of these gateway pages.

Garrett Colburn of Web Associates pointed me to two companies that are bringing a bit of creativity to the global gateway, with rather uneven results.

First, we have Coleman:

Instead of “Select your country,” the site asks “Where do you want to play outside?”

The trouble with this approach is that Coleman doesn’t yet offer many outdoor places to play. For example, the only Latin American Web site is for Venezuela, not a country that I associate with “play” these days. And where is Brazil and Argentina?

A global gateway page calls attention not only to the countries you support but also those you do not support. In this case, by using a large map, the user sees all the parts of the world that Coleman does not yet support. You probably don’t want to use a map if there are only a small fraction of places on that map that are clickable.

As an alternative, consider the more austere and irreverent approach demonstrated by Ride Snowboards:

There is no map of the world on this splash page, just a collection of food types to represent parts of the world. One clearly evident flaw is the fact that the languages are not in their native languages. For example, “German” should be “Deutsch.” This is a very common mistake made by English-speaking designers.

Now, what does food have to do with snowboards? You’ve got me, though that’s probably the point of this exercise. A little irreverence might be right in line with the target audience, which does not include me.

I did check out two competitors, and their splash gateways are relatively staid in comparison.

Here is the Burton splash gateway:

Burton may be staid, but in my opinion, this is most user-friendly gateway of the lot. Notice how the languages are translated. This may seem like a minor detail, but imagine if you visited a splash global gateway and the link to the US Web site was in, say, Arabic script. It wouldn’t be that easy to find. Language is the single most important element of user-friendly navigation.

Finally, here is the K2 gateway:

Notice how K2 does not provide translated language names, similar to the Ride gateway. It could be these companies share the same corporate parent (or the same Web designer).

As more and more companies develop splash global gateways, we’re going to see more and more creative approaches, which is very exciting. Just keep in mind that the splash global gateway strategy you settle upon should be usable first, creative second.

It’s a great way to understand what people who don’t speak English go through when they visit the global home (.com) pages of companies such as Amazon or Apple, which offer their default content in English.

I recently visited the home page of the French company Kannad, excerpted below:

The .com page is in French, so I immediately looked for some link to English content.

And here’s a close-up of the link I used to get to the English site, the UK flag:

While I knew that this link would take me to English content, flags should be used to indicate countries and not languages.

What Kannad should do is use no flag at all. “English” in plain text would suffice just fine.

For more information on global navigation, check out The Art of the Global Gateway.

So now it’s time to take a deep breath and take a shot at predicting the future of Web globalization. The following predictions are based on current trends as well as gut feelings.

Predictions for the Year Ahead

1. The Weak Dollar Drives US Companies to Greatly Boost Web Globalization Spending
Okay, this was an easy call to make. The weak US dollar is helping companies weather a poor local economy by selling their goods abroad. And this year I’ve noticed a number of companies boosting their Web globalization budgets to expand into new markets or improve their current localized Web sites. All signs point to 2008 being a very busy year for translators and Web localization teams.

It’s also worth highlighting a few companies that invested in Web globalization while the dollar was still strong. It’s no sheer coincidence that some of the companies weathering the US downturn thanks to strong overseas sales are also some of the companies at the top of the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card:

• Google
• HP
• Cisco
• Xerox
• Caterpillar

While a great global Web site does not in itself ensure success, it is a major competitive differentiator as companies expand abroad. And those companies that embraced Web globalization early on are now reaping the rewards.

2. Internationalized Domains Names Become a �Surprise� Hit
I have long been a strong proponent of local-language domain names. Next year, ICANN will launch approved IDNs that the local markets will embrace. The media will report the surprising success these domains see in their respective countries. China in particular will report more than two million registrations in one month (probably in 2009).

The demand for local-language domains is there. Yes, there are plenty of details yet to be worked through at ICANN and there will no doubt be technical and political obstacles along the way — which will also be widely reported by the media. But next year will mark that point in time when the Internet begins to provide a true local-language end-to-end Internet experience for users around the world.

3. China Requires Companies to Register Chinese-Language Domains
China has been the most vocal proponent of IDNs. The government effectively argues that the Internet cannot be user friendly for its citizens until they can enter domain names in the native Chinese script. Now that IDNs are becoming a reality, I expect China to begin requiring companies that wish to do business in China to register IDNs.

China would probably initially require those companies that are licensed to host sites within China to register IDNs, but it may also go after companies that host outside of China as well. There is also a financial incentive for this requirement, as these registrations will benefit state-owned domain registries. Following in China’s steps, Russia will also require the registration of Cyrillic domains, and other countries may also follow.

From a usability perspective, we expect most companies to register IDNs for China and Russia (and elsewhere) regardless of any such regulations. But the regulations will be a wake-up call to those companies that have overlooked IDNs.

4. The .asia Domain Will Not Equal the Success of .eu
In one year, the .eu domain surpassed 2.5 million registrations. It would stand to reason that the forthcoming .asia domain, which represents a far larger population, would be even more popular.

I’m not so sure. I believe that .asia will be fortunate if it reaches 1 million registrations in its first year, and it may not exceed half a million. The reason for this is two-fold:

• No geographic boundary. While .eu refers to a group of clearly defined countries, what countries does .asia refer to exactly? I’m not sure, and neither is anyone I’ve asked.
• IDNs are better. China, Korea, Vietnam and others are going to embrace domains in their native language rather than the .asia domain.

The sunrise period for .asia began in November, and the DotAsia registry reports 15,000 applications, the majority of which have come from US corporations. This is hardly an overwhelming response and a sign that 2008 will be an underwhelming year for registrations.

5. Splash Global Gateways Become Ubiquitous
Early this year, during the course of research for the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card, I found that approximately 30% of the 200 Web sites reviewed made use of a splash (or landing page) global gateway, such as the one shown here:

That figure was a 20% increase from the year before and a sign of a trend that we do not see slowing. By the end of 2008, nearly half of all large multinationals will make use of splash global gateways.

6. Geolocation Gains Fans (and Enemies)
Geolocation is a “behind the scenes” way of guessing a Web user’s location by analyzing his or her IP address. It can be quite effective, and Google has used it for years. Amazon and Expedia also use it selectively, and more companies will follow suit next year.

However, I think we will also begin to see news reports of geolocation being used to keep people out of Web sites. For example, Amazon may offer a special discount on a book in one country and not the other, and it does not want users in the non-discounted country to know better. Using geolocation, users could be barred from seeing these discounts or products altogether, without being the wiser.

Geolocation could be used to create geographically gated communities on the Internet, something that goes against the spirit of the Internet but is also difficult to stop.

7. Multilingual Corporate Blogs Go Mainstream
While lawyers in companies around the globe fret over the legal implications of supporting employee blogs, more and more companies are taking the plunge, from Dell to Sun to Google. From a budgetary perspective, blogs offer the ideal way to bypass the cost-per-word limitation of translation while offering plenty of local content. Naturally, companies need good writers locally who can contribute relevant content, but these writers do exist, and forward-looking companies will put them to good use.

8. Wal-Mart Launches a Spanish Site for the US
While retailers like Lowe’s and Staples have launched Spanish-language Web sites for the US market, Wal-Mart has remained on the sidelines. This will change in 2008.

I witnessed a sign that Wal-Mart is headed in this direction during the week of Thanksgiving.

Wal-Mart ran a Web-based promotion that was bilingual, as shown here:

If you were to click through on any of these product links, you would be taken to English-language text. But I think this will change, probably by next Thanksgiving.

Looking Beyond 2008

9. Baidu and Yandex Enter the US to Challenge Google
If one the best forms of defense is a strong offense, I expect Chinese search engine leader Baidu and Russian search engine leader Yandex to attack Google on its home turf.

Yandex, shown here, continues to lead in Russia despite Google’s best efforts. And the success of both Yandex and Baidu hint that the search engine wars globally have only just begun.

10a. Google Becomes Your Company’s Internal Translator
Google Apps is a Web-based platform that businesses small and large rely on to support email and collaboration. At some point in the future, Google will provide business members with integrated access to Google Translate.

Google Translate will allow executives to have foreign-language emails translated in real-time into their native language. Web browsing can also be translated in real time for executives who want to learn more about foreign competition. All of this will be powered by Google’s in-house statistical machine translation (SMT) engine and it will be tailored to the company’s industry terminology.

The quality of this translation will by no means be perfect. But as Google’s engine gets to understand your business and as its global memory database grows, the quality of translations will improve. Google will allow companies to upload their own translation memories to further improve Google’s SMT engine.

10b. Google Becomes Your Company’s External Translator
Eventually, companies will become so comfortable with Google’s translation abilities that it will allow Google to be the company’s “front end” for specific types of Web content.

For example, a company may offer a public blog in English and will allow Google’s SMT engine to translate it for the world. Since this is content that the company may not have ever paid to have manually translated, it’s a nice proposition for both the company and consumers.

Naturally, there are a lot of “ifs” involved. Companies must upload their translation memories to provide the level of quality required, and the public must be satisfied with less-than-perfect translation quality.

But the ramifications of Google acting as a “multilingual interface” is significant. It could very well mean that we’ll see companies actually decrease their pure translation spending in the years ahead. But that does not mean they won’t be spending money on Web globalization. Their spending will probably increase, but it will be focused on content creators, editors, user advocates, and community managers.

What does this mean to vendors? It means that the time is now to begin thinking about how your company will thrive in a world where translation is not your core source of revenue.

Our feature article is on established and emerging best practices in global navigation. We note improvements made recently by companies such as eBay and GE. And we include a checklist that you can use when developing your company’s global gateway strategy.

Here is what else is included in this issue:

• The Guide to Global Navigation: The best sites and best practices
• Global Domain Names Update: Of IDNs and ccTLDs
• Connecting the Global Dots: An interview with Clay Tablet
• Google’s Global Developments: From India to Apps
• Idiom WorldServer 9: Software highlights
• Globalization Briefs: Of Arrows and Web Localization
• Vendor News: Molecular, SDL, Lionbridge

If you’re interested in subscribing to Global by Design, please contact us.

Also, if you want the complete guide on global navigation best practices, check out The Art of the Global Gateway.

Here’s what a multilingual domain name looks like:

About a week ago, Verisign launched the i-Nav plug-in. This piece of software works with your Internet browser to support the input and resolution of multilingual domain names. Other companies have offered similar plug-ins for years, but Verisign, by its sheer market dominance, is the one company that stands a shot at making it succeed. You can download it here.

I’ve been writing about multilingual domain names for years. You can read one past article here. I’m glad to see Verisign offering the plug-in, but I’m still looking forward to the day when this functionality comes built in to every Web browser.