I once had a client who insisted that we design his new business website in the colors of the rainbow. It was the one experience where I was grateful to have a client who had a clear vision for their brand and who was willing to provide feedback and advice on shaping that vision, but at the same time ... he wanted a rainbow website.

There were three reasons why my web design team and I were opposed to the rainbow color palette:

  • It was too colorful to be on a business website (we are talking about five pages with minimal content).
  • The rainbow color palette has special meaning for different groups. In my client's case, he was a Buddhist and assumed that everyone automatically associates the colors of the rainbow with Buddhism.
  • Colors represent different ideas around the world. Seeing how he wanted to reach a global audience, we did not believe that this palette of colors would be a particularly smart choice.

Even after presenting extensive research on rainbows and how people all over the world perceived these colors, our client insisted on using them. It's ultimately his decision (since it was his site, after all), so that finally our designer infused his site with a very colorful palette.

Why am I telling you this story? Because, despite the extremely positive response of the customer on its new WordPress site, the analyzes presented a very different story. Six months later, even after optimizing his site for research and with all our efforts to boost his social media, traffic on his site was low, the bounce rate was high and there was really no organic search traffic, either locally or internationally.

This is why it is important to do your research before starting a new web design project. Everything you perceive about the customer persona and the role they play in improving your site's design and conversion journey is totally valid. I would say they are even more important when you decide to give your business global reach.

So, today, let's focus on how you can design websites for a global audience and why the approach should be different from what you think is normal.

Localization Tips to Design a WordPress Site for a Global Audience

There are several reasons why you are considering expanding your business website into a global market:

  • The Internet makes it easy.
  • There is potential to reach a market untapped by competition.
  • Your product or service can be very good for consumers in other countries.
  • You can now easily hire people to work for you around the world to manage 24 24 hours support and 7 days on 7, customer calls and more.

If you're trying to design your WordPress site for a global audience and don't want to spend months trying to create 50 different subdomains, each targeting users in a different country, you'll need a little help. .

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you decide to relocate your site.

Tip # 1. Translate it

For the convenience of all your visiteurs, it would be great to provide translations of your content. Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to hire native language translators to deliver fully localized website texts, so your only way out can be expensive is to use a WordPress Plugin.

The plugin « Translate Weglot is a good tool, because it does everything you would need. It automatically creates the international drop-down option at the top of your site, allowing visiteurs to know where to access the translated version. It's SEO friendly. It provides translations in over 60 languages. And you can also use the premium service if you want to get custom translations from Weglot. Another great premium option is WPML, which offers a similar service.

Tip # 2. Think about the extensibility of design

Responsive design create a website

Responsive design is obviously a must for your site, globalized or not. However, if you plan to target users in other countries, it would be a good idea to do your research on the types of devices they use most often to access the internet (since your optimization and testing process usually does not include them). You can use your own Google data Analytics to start this search.

Tip # 3. Take direction into consideration

When you're designing a website, you're probably used to working with a language like French that goes from left to right. That's why research into optimal placement for things like calls to action suggests that the right side of the page is the logical end point for calls to action. visiteurs.

But what if you intend to target users in countries where languages ​​like Arabic and Hebrew are written right to left? While you will find languages ​​like Japanese that have adapted their writing orientation online to what we consider to be the left-to-right norm, others have not, so you have to think about how that is. will affect your design if you plan to include these translation options.

Tip # 5. Use "HREFLANG" tags

If you provide translations on the spot (instead of using the plugin mentioned above), you'll want to tell Google what the target language for the page is. You can do this by adding an hreflang tag to translated pages or posts. This way, if someone from Greece searches for something related to your site, the search engines will present the translated page for that user.

Tip # 6. Check your keywords

On a related note, you will need to use globally optimized keywords on your site. It doesn't mean you should use formulas like "independent WordPress developer". Instead, it's more about finding a broadly acceptable term since word order or choice might be irrelevant in other countries. For example, it may be said "programmer" instead of "developer" in the UK. You want to account for these slight variations in the keywords on your site.

Tip # 7. Attention to color

The anecdote I shared earlier is obviously an example of this, but color can be a tricky issue when not handled appropriately for a global audience.

Think about the types of colors with which we have positive associations here. White, for example, can be symbolic of purity and cleanliness (that's why we like it for minimal websites). But then, from an international point of view, white can represent death.

That doesn't mean you can't use white in your site's background. I think it's generally understood at this point that white is the default backdrop for clean, minimal designs. However, there are other colors you can use, especially if you know the countries or cultures that you want to target specifically. Do your research on color symbolism before tackling major color swatches to make sure you don't offend the visual sensibilities of your audience.

That's all for this tutorial, I hope these tips will help you design your website or that of a customer with much more regard when international reach is at stake.