If you are living in a country that its native language is something rather than English language, then you may like to develop your website to offer content in the language of your own country.

There are millions of websites on the Internet that are all in English language but there are billions of people on the earth that speak in a different language and are not familiar with English language.

However, most of the Internet users are basically familiar with English language and could use the Internet but there are many subjects that are hard to understand for those people whom their language is not English.

One example is websites related to pharmaceutics. There are tons of very difficult to understand phrases in the content. The other example is educational websites that basically should provide content in the local language not English language.

You may have many clients and business partners that wish to read your sales copy and product information in their own language.

So, having a website that provides the content in a language rather than English language is necessary for you. Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Dutch, France and many other languages are general samples of most used languages on the Internet. For you to start a multilingual website, it is vital to consider some tips before starting to design and develop your websites:

1- The Code Page

The best code page that you should choose for your web pages is Unicode. Unicode is a kind of numeric presentation of characters that is two bytes and so can contain up to 65535 characters to show. Until now, there have been no human being languages in the universe that have had more than these much characters. So, by using Unicode, you are able to show all characters of your language. To represent your web page as a Unicode page, add below line of code in the head part of your page:

2- Tools For Development

For creating web pages in Unicode format, you should have a tool to be able to type in your language. One of the tools that are widely used by web developers is Microsoft Front Page.

If this tool is installed on Windows XP then you have the most powerful set of software to create Unicode documents. FrontPage is a WYSIWYG tool for creating web pages and you can easily choose the language of your web page in options of the page and appropriate HTML tags would be automatically inserted in the code.

3- Nature of the Language

If your language is Right-To-Left like many of Asian and Middle East languages, for example, Arabic, Persian and Hebrew, you should tune your operating system to be able to switch from Left-To-Right to Right-To-Left typing method to be able to type from Right and from Left. If you are a Microsoft Windows user, you can configure your system for multiple languages and keyboards, each of them having different kind of input methods. For example, you can add Farsi as the second language of your Windows and then switch from English to Farsi by pressing a combination of keys and start typing in Farsi. Also switching from RTL to LTR would be possible by another key combination.

4- Navigation and Design Considerations

Some languages force to apply some changes in the design and navigation of your website. For example, if you have a vertical menu bar, you may put it in the left of your pages for English pages and in the right for Arabic pages because Arabic is a RTL language and people are used to start reading pages from right to left. However this is not a rule, but it is better to consider it in designing pages.

Other issue is the entrance page. If your website is in two languages, you may add an entrance page that makes client choose the navigation language of your website. This page could be a very nice graphical page with two options for choosing desired language and then enters the web site in that language. In some cases, you may consider one language as the base and eliminate entrance page. In this case, you assume most of the visitors may use a language that is dominant and they enter automatically the web pages of your web site that are in that language. However, visitors would see a small icon in web pages that lets them switch to the other language.

Other method is to use IP2Country services that can find the country of the visitor from its IP address and by adding some simple dynamic code to your pages, you would be able to switch to the language of the visitor. However, this method is not %100 accurate and you should consider some percent of fault in recognizing the country of the visitor.

5- Font Face Considerations

When you are creating your web pages in a language rather than English, you would be limited in using font faces. There are a few font faces in windows that are installed automatically and can show multilingual characters. If you like your visitors view your pages correct without any need to install fonts, you have to use those minor number of multilingual fonts. One of the best font faces is Tahoma that is somehow easy to read and contains all Unicode characters also is included in Windows.

6- Database Driven Web Sites

If your web site is a database driven and you have forms that clients may fill and be posted to database, there would be lots of very technical issues that you should consider to be able to collect and retrieve data in different languages. This part is beyond the aims of this article.

7- Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a major issue for multilingual web sites and you should be aware that not necessarily all major search engines and directories handle multilingual web pages perfectly and your web site may not be listed in many of them. Google is a search engine that indexes multilingual web pages too. However there are some issues and difficulties but it works well enough for your web site to be indexed in your language.

8- Domain Name

No matter in which language is your web site, the domain name of your web site should be in English because at this time, having a domain name in other language is not a very easy thing to have and multilingual domain names are a new issue and is under development. There are some solutions but are not yet set perfectly. So, I suggest you forget those solutions and choose an English name for your web site.

9- Web Server And Hosting

However major web servers, like Microsoft IIS and Apache both support multilingual web pages, but I strongly recommend you to ask the hosting company for this issue and make yourself sure that there wont be problems for your web pages to be served by the hosting company.

10- Name Web Site Files

Never use Unicode characters in the name of your web pages. However your operating system, like Windows, lets your choose the file names in Unicode characters but be %100 sure that theses web pages would have serious difficulties both server side and client side.

In many cases, you won’t be able even to upload your web pages to your host space and client’s browsers also won’t be able to recognize the name of page and would generate error. This is true for name of images, flash files, scripts and other pages. Just use English names.

However I have tried to cover major issues in developing multilingual web sites but this issue is something that needs experience and you should yourself discover many of new issues that are not included in this article.

About The Author

Mahmood Bashaash is the owner of SGNetway Company in web address of www.sgnetway.com which is focused on developing web sites and web applications and is the author of MahmoodB web site and newsletter that reveals hundreds of killer Internet marketing tips and tricks. To access his articles, visit: http://www.mahmoodb.com; mahmoodb@sgnetway.com

Copyright 2005 Robert Evans

Setting yourself up to earn a steady monthly income has to be a pre-requisite to your success online. There is no doubt that large sums of money can be made (and indeed are being made) from selling products or services online.

With over 500,000,000 internet users (and that figure is already obsolete even as I write this) the potential for long term wealth is very high indeed.

This fantastic new medium has brought untold possibilities for the small trader operating in a niche market. In fact the
internet is made for just that type of marketer. It therefore goes without saying that anyone with the desire, knowledge or
ability to market just about any kind of product or service online is a potential millionaire in the making!

You are probably already aware of the importance of having a website to use as a focal point for any products or services
you are selling.

But do you know the golden rule you should always keep in mind when building your site and making it ready to welcome all those potential buyers? This rule is - keep it simple!

When I started out with my first web site I broke this rule of simplicity by filling every inch of my Home Page with all manner of graphics and fonts. This slowed down the loading time. There were also a number of links to other web sites that took my visitors away from my site - and almost certainly they never came back.

It took me a whole eighteen months to realise that what I was doing was never going to work. When I now look at the
websites I was promoting a year and a half ago I cringe. What possessed me to put so much effort into them! Because I really did work hard at putting them together.

Take a good look at your own site. Pay very close attention to the following points:

* page design - navigation should be easy
* HTML - use of keywords in title and description meta tags
* use of graphics - minimum number should be used relevant to the theme of the site
* use of text/fonts - black text on a white background works best
* hyperlinks - use the “target_blank” tag to ensure external pages open in a new window
* reason for existence - is the purpose of the site clear?

Believe me, when it comes to setting up a website that SELLS, you do not need stunning graphics, dynamic HTML or Java Script. These things could spell the end of your business! Especially when it comes to getting ranked on the major Search Engines. (Don’t ignore these, they could be responsible for up to 80% of traffic to your site!)

So, here is a summary of how your Home Page should be made up:

* a maximum of 2 graphics and these must be central to the theme of the site
* about 800 words of text, including a list of benefits and a good description of what you offer
* a clear navigation bar
* a colour scheme that is consistent but not “glaring”
* any links to external sites should open in a new window
* try to avoid placing a graphic at the top of the page
* use Meta Tags that include one or two keywords in the title and three or four in the description
* try to keep the page under 20 kbs - 10 would be ideal

And all other pages should follow the same basic design. Keep these points in mind and you will be well on the way to creating a fast loading page that will be pleasing on the eye and will also be acceptable to the major Search Engines. And when it comes to submitting your site - there is no real need to do this, just keep updating your pages on a regular basis. This is better than submitting your site because in any case the search engine spiders ill find your site if it is worth finding.

Robert Evans has been doing business online since October 2000. He runs a resource center and provides dozens of free and low cost marketing techniques: http://www.market4profit.net

In a previous set of Articles published here at EzineArticles I discussed the implementation of RSS and how you could create an RSS feed for yourself.

These next few articles are going to be devoted to something a bit different. We will categorize it as Web Development and I will try and go through a case-scenario of building a web-site and everything you may need to know about doing it.

If you think that building a web-site is something simple and you can do it in one day, and you WANT THAT WEBSITE TO WORK, think again. I have worked in high-tech for many years, and the one thing these days I find incredibly funny, is all these promises that you can build a web-site in a day and be rich by next month. Realistically, that is not going to happen. Realistically, like any other business you want to succeed at this takes work and patience and luck. A great deal of work, the patience of an angel and the proverbial luck of the Irish.

First thing is first. Ignore all those emails you get that promise to make you rich in a week. Ignore any type of scheme that promises you advertisement to five hundred million web sites for $29.00. Ignore all those web pages with fanciful ebooks written by people JUST LIKE YOURSELF trying to make a buck by putting a few pages together in an Adobe PDF file. (Ask yourself this. How many people do you personally know that actually READ those ebooks? I still have not one found one person to ever admit to reading them!) Ignore anyone who tells you that they can show you the way to riches if you pay them $35.00 for their scheme. They are the ONLY ONES getting rich. Ignore it ALL. I know the temptation is great. After all what is $29.00. And of course they all promise you 30 money back guarantees. Don’t do it. Don’t think it. Don’t fall for it.

Let us complicate matters a bit more. It is simply not enough to build a web site and put it out there. I am sure most of you know that.

• Content is KING - Don’t think that the phrase “content is king” is going to get you listed all the way on top either. Content is critical, but Google and Yahoo and MSN (the search-engine trinity) have created an incredible amount of new algorithms to decide just WHICH content is critical and which is not. CONTENT IS KING - but it must be content on your web site, NOT links to content on other web sites.
• Linking to your web site from other web-sites is also critical.
• KeyWords - Keywords, search terms etc.

All these are critical. But how do we get there? How do we go from an idea to the final production phase?

The one or two page web sites that contain content written by others and dropped into your web site are great if you have the ability to create say 500 subdomains and template each one. But guess what? Google has even found a way around that. You may achieve high rankings for a couple of weeks, and then you will have need of some serious meds as you watch your web rankings go to the gutter.

Before delving deeper into all these problems and many, many, dare I repeat, MANY more, realize that a truly functional business web-site these days should or may contain the following:

1. Web Site itself
2. Blog Connected to the Website
3. Forum Connected to the Website
4. Perhaps even a Wiki connected to the Website

Each of these has its up and downs. Each one of these demands work and dedication. Each one of these demands that you invest time and effort (and I will attempt to show you how to save a great deal of money as well.)

Now you have your head on right and your thoughts centered let us understand what goes into building a web site that will attract visitors, make sales, keep customers coming to you, and stay somewhere near the top of the search engine ratings. Notice I did not say the top, but near the top. Of course, you can get on the top as well. That happens to be easy. Just join Adwords and Overture and advertise. (By the way that is not a bad idea for creating initial traffic.) But in these articles we are going to avoid the funds layout proposition as much as possible.

Now, I know what many of you may be thinking. He is talking about a full-blown web site. All I want is a three page web site so that I can offer some product, maybe have some affiliates and voila everyone will buy or click on my affiliate or Google Adsense advertisements.

Maybe that will happen to you. There are some people out there that do make an incredible amount of money from Google Adsense. That is a fact. But they know how to build their web sites and they know just how to attract customers or “eyeballs” as it is called. And getting those “eyeballs” where you have on the average of less than 7 seconds to interest someone is difficult. That is right 7 seconds!

To end this first article I will simply quote an email the I received from EzineArticles itself.
In it we were told that the article entitled “Want to Try on That New Hair Style Before You Get It?”
had 108,898 page views! Now if you would have asked me which article would get such page views, I would certainly have NEVER even considered an article about “hair”.

The Internet is full of surprises. ONLY because the human condition is full of surprises. Only because it reflects who we are and what our society is like. Building a web site which works is a reflection of your intuitiveness, resourcefulness and understanding just what people want and how to give it to them. It is very much like building a company.

Now if you will excuse me I am going to go write an article about how I tease my white hair and keep it from falling out.

Ted W. Gross owns Virgin Earth, a real estate brokerage firm in Jerusalem, Israel. Virgin Earth represents residential and commercial real estate all over Israel. Virgin Earth also maintains an RSS Feed on its current properties and also operates Virgin Earth - Israel Tourism & Information Portal on the same site. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.Virgin Earth also maintains a blog.Virgin Earth Blog

So you have an excellent product or service. You know how to sell it and increase sales by traditional methods - word-of-mouth & direct mail to name two. Now which of following is you:-

• You know that you should be using the internet to grow your business but you are not sure how. You know that if you don’t your competitors are going to get an upper hand. Or …
• You are convinced that the internet is total waste of time as it has already burnt a whole in your budget and wasted a lot of your time. Your internet presence is an embarrassment to your company and detracts rather than adds to the value of your products or services. You want to get rid of it but you know you can’t. You don’t know what to do. Or…
• You have a web site that attracts potential customers that you would not otherwise had access to, a good proportion of them become your customers and repeatedly buy from you. You measure results & know how effective your marketing budget is and you are able to confidently spend more on marketing that works.

If the third description fits you - Congratulations. You will Knock Out The Competition With A Web site To Die For! If its one of the first two descriptions that fit then you need to do something about it.

Web site Objectives
Your web site is just one tool in the toolbox of your company that is used to market & sell your product & services. That is, a web site MUST sell. All sales & marketing processes have two simple steps and web sites are no different. For web sites those two steps are:-

• Visitors from your target audience arriving at your web site, i.e. a steady stream of qualified leads.
• Conversion of your visitors into customers - and the web site may only be part of that process.

Miss out either of the above and your web site is ineffective. Everything else revolves around these two objectives. Converting interest into action is the only way you turn a marketing budget into real sales.

Business not Technology
Too often, you will hear web companies preach to you about virtues of each of these areas but as a business owner what you need to know which of these areas should receive your attention and budget to achieve your business objective of getting qualified prospects and converting them into customers. There are no hard and fast rules but one component outweighs all others. And that is content. Good content will have the most effect on both the search engines and you human visitors.

Content is King
Copy writing, is probably the most important item on your web site. It is said that Content is King and it is absolutely true. Why, you have to ask, do so many companies, pay thousands to develop a web site with smart flash animations and graphics and then write the content themselves then? It can only be that they have not grasped the importance of the words on their web site. After all it’s the words that people read, it’s the words that call people to action, it’s the words that sell. The rest helps, but a site with poor words is as bad as a site with no words and that is just unheard of.

There is a plethora of “top ten’s” about building a good web site and there are two themes that run through them all and one of them is that Content is King. Search Engine Optimization Experts may well be able to rewrite parts of your web site to appear attractive to the search engines, appear on the first page of Goggle and get you more visitors. But the resultant text & layout is so unfriendly to the human reader that they are immediately turned off and hit the back button. Content is a double-edged sword because it is used by the search engines to provide search results and the very same content must compel the human visitor in to action.

Let Your Prospects Get To Know You
Earlier I mentioned that two themes run through web site “top ten’s”. The second theme is to develop a long-term relationship with your potential customer. The web is an inherently distrustful medium and you have got to instill confidence into your potential customer that you are a real personable organization worth doing business with. None of this is rocket science but it is so often not done. Some ways of doing it are :-

• Testimonials from previous clients
• Independent Product or Service Reviews
• Awards
• Case studies
• Worthwhile original content

Once the initial confidence is built up you can focus on building a long-term relationship with your new prospect. Again there are many ways to do this where the aim is keep in constant contact with your prospect. Easy and growing in popularity are:

• Regular Electronic Newsletters
• Free Reports
• Free mini-Courses

Once produced they cost nothing to keep sending to your prospects and the technology is in place to allow you to do this with minimal time involvement from yourself.

Foundations
A web site is too often seen as a product, something delivered at a point in time. It is true that there is a point in time when the web site goes live but this is very short-sighted to see it this way. And you can be sure you will never wipe out the competition this way. Beating the competition is a long-term strategy . It takes time and it takes a process that starts way before any discussion about the technology takes place.

Conclusion
You need someone to understand your business, take you through a proven process, talk business not technology and then develop a solution to match. Your business needs to attract the attention of its target market (niche) and then convert them to customers. How do you do that? Be personal, develop a relationship, show them you are real and can be trusted and are worth getting to know. Time is precious and your audience is thinking “Are you worth giving up my time for?”.

Once done, its just a matter of time before they buy. If they are the right audience then time is the only variable.

So the word web site is insufficient. The phrase Internet Marketing Solution is much better. Don’t buy a web site it will cost you. Invest in an Internet Marketing Solution it will reward you. After all, that is your objective to market your product & services on the internet. And you want a solution that provides everything - the core web site design & development, good graphics, copy writing, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, and Email marketing.

© Rugged Rhino 2005

Jeremy Curtis runs Rugged Rhino - Small Business Web Design Specialists. He can be contacted at http://www.ruggedrhino.co.uk or 0845 201 1946.

Q: Should I build and maintain my business Web site myself or pay someone else to do the work for me?
– Wesley L.

A: When you say, pay someone else to do the work for you, Wesley, I am going to assume that you are talking about hiring a professional Web site designer to do the work and not your next-door neighbor’s teenage son. If my assumption is correct, then read on. If not, go ahead and surf on over to Dilbert.com. You will get no good out of the advice I’m about to give, so you might as well consult Dilbert for your hot business tips.

Should you build and maintain your business Web site yourself or pay someone to do it for you? Let me answer your question with a couple of my own. Number one: is building and maintaining Web sites the key focus of your business? Number two: could your time be better spent doing more important things like, oh I don’t know, say running your business? If your answers were no and yes, respectively, then you have no business building and maintain a Web site.

Remember this: every minute you spend on tasks that are not related to the key focus of your business is time spent to the detriment of your business. In other words, every minute you spend focusing on tasks that do not contribute to the growth of your business and thereby increase your bottom line is time wasted.

If you want to be a web designer, be a web designer. However, if the key focus of your business is building widgets, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that your time would be better spent building widgets, not Web sites.

Case in point: I once had a very wealthy dentist ask if I could teach him how to maintain his Web site so he wouldn’t have to pay me to do it. Now my teeth had helped put this guy’s kids through college, but that didn’t seem to matter. At that moment he was more concerned about having to pay for changes to his Web site than my personal oral hygiene. Sure, I said, I’ll be glad to teach you how to update your Web site, just as soon as you teach me how to clean my own teeth so I don’t have to pay you to do it. He got the point. And he charged me enough for the cleaning to keep his site updated for months. Smart man.

Many business owners think they can’t afford a professionally designed Web site and that simply is not true. While the old adage, “you get what you pay for” is never more true than when applied to Web site design, having a professional web designer do the work for you is money well spent. A well-designed Web site can bring you a many-fold return on your investment. You can’t say that about too many other collaterals. While it is best to leave Web site design and maintenance to the experts, it is up to you (or someone considered a subject matter expert within our company) to provide the designer with the content (text and photographs) that best conveys your company’s message to your customers. A Web site, no matter how well designed, is meaningless if it lacks the content required to interest customers in the products you sell or services you provide.

Here’s are a few questions that, once answered, will help ensure that your Web site’s message is as appealing as its design. Go over these points with the designer before the design process begins as the answers will help determine the direction your Web site’s design should take.

What Is The Purpose Of Your Web Site? Most business Web sites have two purposes: (1) to educate the consumer and, (2) to sell them products or services. If you sell shoes, for example, the purpose of your Web site is to educate potential customers on the quality and durability of your shoes and as a result, to sell them shoes. If you paint houses the purpose of your Web site is to educate home owners on why your services are superior to other painters and sell them on hiring you to paint their house. By defining the purpose of your Web site you will give the designer the information required to create a Web site that best conveys that purpose to your target audience.

Who Is My Target Audience? Your target audience consists of those folks you want to attract to your Web site: potential and current customers, future and current employees, possible investors, etc. Anyone who might be interested in your company and its products or services is a member of your target audience. Correctly identifying your target audience is vital since your Web site should be designed specifically to appeal to your target audience.

Put yourself in their shoes (or in front of their computers). Imagine your Web site through their eyes. If you were visiting a Web site such as yours what would you expect to find and what would you be disappointed not to find? Identify your target audience, then have your Web site designed to fulfill their needs and surpass their xpectations.

What Content Should My Web Site Feature? Your Web site content should be driven by the nature of your business. If you’re a real estate agent, your site should feature photographs of homes you have for sale and information on buying and selling a home. If you own an auto body shop, your site might feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. Remember to determine the purpose of your site, then develop the content to serve that purpose.

What’s My Competition Doing? The last question you should ask is one of the most important: What is your competition doing on the Web? Do a Google search for similar businesses and click around their Web sites. How are their Web sites designed? What message are they trying to convey? Are they doing a good job of conveying that message and as a result, selling products? What do you like about their Web sites? What don’t you like? Make note of the things you like and the things you hate, then share your findings with your site designer.

Remember, you’re not stealing trade secrets here.

You’re just borrowing ideas.

Here’s to your success.

Tim Knox

Small Business Q&A is written by veteran entrepreneur and syndicated columnist, Tim Knox. Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net, an online organization dedicated to the success of online and eBay entrepreneurs.

Related Links: http://www.prosperityandprofits.com
http://www.smallbusinessqa.com
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