How to Build a Website that Supports Multiple Languages

January 30 2013

By Chadwick Meyer

If you have a business or non-profit that serves a multi-language audience, you will want to make sure that your website has multi-language capabilities.

Gutensite can help you create a website that toggles back and forth between two or more languages without creating an overly complicated administrative headache.

The control panel does not allow each piece of content to have two (or more) different translations, or promo images (since many graphics have text), etc. There are many reasons for this purposeful limitation:

Multi-Language support for every piece of content ends up creating an unnecessarily complicated management interface.
When you are targetting two different countries or cultures, you will often want/need to customize your message to each group. This may require including different promoted features on the home page, different pages in your menu, different sidebar promos, etc. Often it isn't a one-for-one pure translation.
You may want to have different members of your team, or different global offices be responsible for the content of their localized website.

So our solution is to create two (or more) websites that are linked to one another, use the same design template across both websites (customized if necessary for one or the other) and may even share the same visitor accounts. But the websites have two different administrative control panel accounts so that editing the content on the French site is done in one admin account, and the English site is edited in another admin account.

This makes a simpler approach to managing the websites, and for the visitor it's seemless. Plus you get a website that is using the local domain. The english website might be http://www.mysite.com and the french website might be http://www.mysite.fr and the website will then have some buttons in the header that lets visitors pick their preferred language.

If you need help with a project like this, let us know.

Tags : multi-language, language, multiple, websites, audience, countries

Comments:

Archives

June 10, 2022

Common Questions about Migrating Your Website from 1.0 to 2.0

Your website on the retro 1.0 version of our platform will continue to function until at least June 2023, and after that we will keep the old platform working as long as is necessary/reasonable to ...

June 06, 2022

Upgrade Your Old Website to Prevent Lawsuits and Improve Marketing

Over the last few years, we have been working on the overly ambitious project of rebuilding our Website Builder and Content Management System based on modern coding standards, cutting edge design, ...

June 10, 2022

The New Gutensite Website is Live on Our New Platform!

Did you notice we just launched a new version of our website? Go to https://gutensite.com to see what's new. Look around and imagine how your business could be helped if we transformed your website ...

October 06, 2021

ADA Compliance and Website Accessibility Standards

Chadwick Meyer

In the last few months clients have had a growing paranoia about a growing number of ADA lawsuits (Americans with Disabilities Act) for website accessability. There have been reports of "serial ...

September , 2021

New IDX Widget Going Live for Everyone

Chadwick Meyer

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our system and also stay up to date with the changing technology requirements of each MLS, we have created an entirely new IDX Widget that was released to ...

2022 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2021 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2020 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2019 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2018 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2017 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2016 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2015 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2014 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2013 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2012 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2011 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2010 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2009 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

2008 Archives

Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr
May	Jun	Jul	Aug
Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec

Full Archives

Name*
Email
Website
Comment*		Characters Remaining: 5000

WARNING: Archival Site

Gutensite