How to improve customer experience for international websites.

What are the crucial design elements to consider?

Here are some key aspects to consider:

• Images: Not all images are suitable for international markets. Some images can be inappropriate in certain regions, such as clocks which can signify different things (time vs. death), or hand gestures which can be offensive or interpreted differently from region to region. Hand gestures are specifically mentioned as a “no-no”.
• Colors: Colors can signify different meanings or feelings depending on the region. For example, red can mean wealth in China but debt or danger elsewhere.
• Design Layout and Usability: The layout needs to consider the flow of the website, especially for languages that read from right to left (like Arabic). The workflow of images or other elements may need to be flipped, and failing to consider this can cause confusion and a poor customer experience. Also, watch out for using colloquial terms in your text that may not carry across to other countries.
• Payment Systems: Different countries use different preferred payment cards and systems. While Visa and Mastercard might be common in Europe, national debit cards like the Dankort in Denmark are used frequently. New payment systems (Stripe, Revolut, prepaid cards) are also emerging. Your design needs to accommodate these local and new payment methods to make the customer experience easier and better in different countries. Your e-commerce system and its design should include these other payment systems.
• Content Management System (CMS) / Platform: The platform you build your website on needs to support the translation process and the specific languages you plan to support. You need to figure out how text will be extracted, translated, and re-imported. Look for systems that support industry-standard file formats like XLIFF, which helps with interchange with translation agencies. Ensure the system supports languages like Arabic, Chinese, or Korean if you plan to target those markets.
• Custom Web Platforms and Hard-Coded Content: Be aware that custom-developed systems or websites where content is hard-coded can be extremely difficult or impossible to translate. If strings are hardwired into the code, they must be extracted one by one, translated, and put back, which is a very expensive exercise.
• Plugins: Websites often use plugins for various tasks like contact forms or SEO. You should list all the plugins your designers plan to use and ask if they are translatable, as occasionally some are not. Good plugins are available for multilingual SEO, such as Yoast for WordPress.
• Text on Images: Putting text directly on images makes them incredibly difficult and expensive to translate. A recommended approach is to use text overlays, which look good, are easy to translate, and are beneficial for SEO.
• Website Naming Convention / URL Structure: The choice of URL structure (e.g., yoursite.com/fr, yoursite.fr, or fr.yoursite.com) is important and depends on your business direction. yoursite.com/fr is often considered a translation of the English site, while yoursite.fr is seen as a French website in its own right for France. fr.yoursite.com can be considered either. Getting this right from the start is important because it is very expensive to change later and is bad for SEO.

Considering these elements at the outset will save money and make your site more successful, resulting in cheaper and easier translation and a better experience for your international customers.