Consumers who shop online generally prefer to shop on sites if they are in their native language. A survey indicated that people only shopped on websites that they felt comfortable with and helped them make buying decisions easily. So translating your site into multiple languages will help you capture the market, but it can be quite a task. While software development companies strive to make the actual translation a smooth and worry-free process, there is much to consider before the work begins.
Website design is very important if you want to stand out from the crowd. Let’s take a look at how you can create an outstanding and engaging global UX that will help you give your customers a consistent look and feel across all of your global sites.
Select global templates for consistent branding:
You can direct your audience to your website, but you can’t control which site your international visitors go to. Some German visitors may be visiting your UK site or your French site. You already know that you must maintain a consistent brand image and that each site must be a representation of your master website. It is suggested that sites can be customized to suit the tastes of local audiences and to do this you should select a global template for your multilingual site. Your layouts and design templates should be optimized for mobile and desktop as they help increase efficiency, maintain control over visual presentations, manage text expansions, and also increase branding elements. These templates allow teams to run regional campaigns and meet specific local spending and preferences.
Develop websites to use a variety of global Internet speeds:
Before visitors can do anything, the website must first be loaded. If you keep your users waiting until all the text or images have loaded, chances are your visitors will go elsewhere. Internet speed varies greatly around the world and it is important to create your website design to match your Internet speed. So remove, modify or optimize your graphic images or large files that could slow down time for international users.
Create global gateways and take users into account:
When creating global templates, it is important to pay special attention when designing global gateways. Gateways are the navigation system that helps direct users to localized versions of the website. The layout and location of the gateway is also important and the process of finding it should be easy. There are few layouts used for this, and the most common one is the dropdown box where users can select a particular language from the scrolling list.
Guarantee international shopping and shipping experiences:
When it comes to multilingual eCommerce websites, there are several steps you need to take during design. Once you have a clear idea about local purchasing and shipping laws, you should work on developing multilingual websites to accommodate different currencies and shipping formats. The functionalities must be addressed in the design process so that you can internationalize the site to accommodate the variables.
Global date and time format support variations:
Please be aware of local formats when it comes to dates and times. English-speaking countries often use a 12-hour clock, but European countries use a 24-hour clock. Even calendar date formats can also vary and should be used according to local preferences.
Images and icons must be culturally and contextually appropriate:
Your business graphics, icons, symbols and photography should be attractive without being offensive to any culture. For this, you need to do some research and avoid using images of animals or any religious symbols. Choose to use culturally appropriate people in the images and play it safe.