Does your website speak your visitors language?

Posted: October 23, 2008

Many websites exist in multiple languages. However, the way you institute language switching (or country detection and language selection) can make a large impact on your visitor’s ability to interact with your website.

I was recently in Italy. When I visited Google Reader, I was forced to interact with the page in Italian. There was no way I could find to change the language back to English. Google reader exists in many different languages; however, they had taken my language choice away from me and forced me to read the site in Italian (which I don’t speak).

As a comparison, this was also an issue with Google Analytics first launched. However, now on the homepage of the site is an easy to find drop down box that allows you to select the language to view the website.

Having your site in multiple languages can be very useful – if you don’t forget about the visitor.

As a reminder, if you allow someone to switch languages, please reload the exact same page in the new language. Too many sites bring you back to the homepage again, and force you to find the exact same page again in the new language.

If you are working on SEO efforts, you should not be changing the site’s language based upon user location – please have separate, spiederable pages for each page and language combination.

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