A Multilingual Website increases your audience size
Most websites around the world are just one language. They are built in and for a specific country and target language. However, if your business targets more than one language, a web design that includes a multilingual website may be the way to go. For foreigners with businesses in Japan and want an English and Japanese website, Japanese companies that want to expand and target the English world, etc. a multilingual website can greatly increase visitors and customers. With a click of a flag icon your sites page can magically change to a different language! Well, lets be realistic, adding a 2nd language does greatly increase your possible visitors but it also increases your work and content management workload.
Should I add a 2nd language or...
Before adding a 2nd language to your website you should think it through. If the 2nd language site is going to mimic or closely resemble the content and layout of the 1st language, it makes sense to have a multilingual web design. However, if the 2nd language is going to have different content and possibly a different layout of features, it might be a good idea to set up a completely different website and keep the two separate. Keeping track of content and managing multilingual content can get complicated and if the focus of your website/business goal for each language is different, this can complicate things even further.
Furthermore there are different methods as to exactly how you will add a 2nd language. There are Machine Translators (which don't work very well), Semi-Auto translating services and actual human translation. Human translation is of course the way to go but then you'll have to do it yourself, hire an translator or let us handle the translation.
Advantages of a Multilingual web design
- Greatly increases your target audience.
Disadvantages of a Multilingual web design
- Increases content management workload.
- Increases costs if translation services are needed.
- Increases "behind the scenes" coding in order to handle the multilingual functionality therefore extra development costs.
- Increases the amount of resources (RAM and processing power) a website uses. Usually a very small effect but may cause issues on a cheap server.
So, is a Multilingual website worth it?
A multilingual web design is a definite Yes if... you have the extra budget, time and need to put into it.
