In a global marketplace, where product and services from one corner of the world are available for customers located in other corners, businesses are bringing to their processes more cultural relevancy. This is not an occurrence limited to some businesses alone, but is a necessity for all businesses who want to sell their products and services to a global audience. The thoughts, preferences, interests, traditions, ideas, philosophies of global audiences matter, if a business is to achieve a level of success that transcends geographical boundaries. You can also visit sugar crm systems to have an idea about fastest-growing customer relationship management company.
This fact also remains true for even those businesses who are leveraging the potential of their online presence to target audiences all round the world. Yes, even the website design needs to be cross-culturally relevant. Although, this looks like a big ask, it’s not something that is far out of reach. By considering the common cultural trends, designing for a global audience, making your website a solution provider, and adding a few deft touches will help you create the essential “world website”.
Take a look at just some of the ways that you can make a website that suits the preferences of different cultures:
Multilingual Content
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This was a sitter wasn’t it. Yes, the content is always the key to ensuring that people from anywhere in the world can relate to your website. You can stick to English, and still ensure that the content is able to attract visitors from all over the world. What’s more, the content must be such that it keeps the users interested and they keep visiting your website, because they love the content on it; so what this means is that you need to keep updating it. You need keep giving website users something new every time when it comes to the content.
But, what happens to that percentage of the global users who don’t know English?Well to appeal to these users, you will need to offer your content in different languages. Identify those languages, that the largest groups of your target audience speak, and offer content in these languages as well. Even here, the quality of the English used on the website helps matters. Well written content, is easy to translate, so even while your website should focus on being multilingual, the key to a culture conscious website is always good English.
One of the ways most website owners solve the linguistic problem, is not by having multiple websites, each in a different language, but offering auto translation services, on their websites, wherein a user can click on the language of his/her choice, the website will be available in its translated form for the user.
Never Forget the Search Engines
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If you want the visibility of your website to increase globally, then there is no getting away from internet marketing, it is imperative that your website has top rankings on search engines; your website should also rank high on the search engines specific to the country that you want to target. For e.g. if it’s the US markets you are after, then Google.com should be your focus, or if it’s the Brazilian market you want to crack, then your website should rank on Google.com.br and so on and so forth.
Another aspect to having a website that caters to a world audience is the fact that even your keywords need to be translated into the language of the audience that you are catering to. More importantly, do not trust the efficiency of automated services in this regard. Hire the services of professional language experts to translate a given keyword into the specific language.
Color Defines and Unifies Different Cultures
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If there is one think that defines various cultures and their vibrancy, it is colors. So, you need to make your website resonate with colors that unify the purpose of your website across different cultures. A website is only successful if it gets an emotive response out of its audience, and this is possible with the use of perfectly chosen colors. In different cultures, colors stand for many things, and if used well, can be the difference between success and failure of your website. So, do your research and choose those colors that have a degree of commonality with different cultures and can act as the the essential design element that sends the same message across diverse cultures.
Just reading up on these tips and implementing them in a half hearted manner will never allow you to reap rich dividends of a website that appeals to an across the board range of audience. Always remember that the audience out there is intelligent enough to understand the amount of effort gone into the making of a website. This fact assumes tremendous importance in the case of website design that has to draw upon cross cultural reference in order to succeed.