What Companies Handle Country Specific Versions of Their Website the Best
July 23, 2010 3:10 PM Subscribe
What are the best practices for communicating that localized, country specific versions of a web site are available? Is anybody doing this well?
Our goal is 2 fold. First, we want to promote the fact that we are international in scope, so we want to draw attention to the fact that we have country specific sites. Second, we want to make it easy for local customers to find what they're looking for on a local version of the site specific to them.
I've seen companies handle this in a few ways. They might have a country choice page that forces you to pick your country when you first go to the web site. This seems fairly user hostile, but it does meet the promotion goal.
I've also seen companies that guess at a country from your IP address, and automatically direct you to the local version of the site with a link to select an alternate location. That's a little more user friendly, but it may be too subtle on the promotion side of things.
Are there any companies that do it in any other way? Are there any sites you can point me to that seem to do this really well?
Our goal is 2 fold. First, we want to promote the fact that we are international in scope, so we want to draw attention to the fact that we have country specific sites. Second, we want to make it easy for local customers to find what they're looking for on a local version of the site specific to them.
I've seen companies handle this in a few ways. They might have a country choice page that forces you to pick your country when you first go to the web site. This seems fairly user hostile, but it does meet the promotion goal.
I've also seen companies that guess at a country from your IP address, and automatically direct you to the local version of the site with a link to select an alternate location. That's a little more user friendly, but it may be too subtle on the promotion side of things.
Are there any companies that do it in any other way? Are there any sites you can point me to that seem to do this really well?
A mix of both? On first load IP address is determined and you're redirected to the country specific display with a small "Redirecting you to our X State website. Pick a different country?". The text/default page hangs for maybe 5 seconds.
posted by fontophilic at 3:59 PM on July 23, 2010
posted by fontophilic at 3:59 PM on July 23, 2010
I'm with wwartoff - wee flags is definitely my preferred. It's something that people recognise easily, and I certainly pick up on it very fast. The other variation I've seen is using country/region silhouettes (as on the Dr Martens site), but I don't think that's very clear with small images.
There's also Amazon's variation on guessing country from IP - if you go to Amazon.com from a UK IP it comes up at the top "Shopping from the UK? Visit Amazon.co.uk" (again with flag) under the search bar. It leaves you free to carry on using the US site while pointing out that there's a local alternative.
posted by Coobeastie at 4:18 PM on July 23, 2010
There's also Amazon's variation on guessing country from IP - if you go to Amazon.com from a UK IP it comes up at the top "Shopping from the UK? Visit Amazon.co.uk" (again with flag) under the search bar. It leaves you free to carry on using the US site while pointing out that there's a local alternative.
posted by Coobeastie at 4:18 PM on July 23, 2010
I actually like the country selection page, as I'm an English speaker living in Poland, and require the choice of both country and language. Look to airlines - Lufthansa and KLM, for example, let you choose a seemingly-incongruous match (France - English, for example).
And of course, you'll want an "International - English" selection as well, for your visitors from Bhutan and Chile and Cameroon.
posted by mdonley at 4:32 PM on July 23, 2010
And of course, you'll want an "International - English" selection as well, for your visitors from Bhutan and Chile and Cameroon.
posted by mdonley at 4:32 PM on July 23, 2010
Unless the goal of your website is to be a brochure about the company, I think it is unadvisable to make an issue out of how internationalized and localized your website is.
"Choose your country" landing pages I hate.
The IP-based redirect thing I like. It's also possible to browser-sniff a person's preferred languages and it should be possible to redirect based on that.
I think it's a fine idea to include a dropdown menu of localized sites or a parade of little flags as ways to get to those other sites, but the best thing to do is to show the customer what they're looking for right away.
Fujitsu is an interesting case because I think they do some things right and some things wrong. If you go to the most obvious URL, you land on their global site. That gives you the option to click through to whatever local site you want; which they present both through a flash-based map (which is clever but hierarchical and kind of slow) and through an alphabetized, hierarchical dropdown menu that is kind of a nightmare. Once you're on a local site, you've got both those options still available.
posted by adamrice at 4:35 PM on July 23, 2010
"Choose your country" landing pages I hate.
The IP-based redirect thing I like. It's also possible to browser-sniff a person's preferred languages and it should be possible to redirect based on that.
I think it's a fine idea to include a dropdown menu of localized sites or a parade of little flags as ways to get to those other sites, but the best thing to do is to show the customer what they're looking for right away.
Fujitsu is an interesting case because I think they do some things right and some things wrong. If you go to the most obvious URL, you land on their global site. That gives you the option to click through to whatever local site you want; which they present both through a flash-based map (which is clever but hierarchical and kind of slow) and through an alphabetized, hierarchical dropdown menu that is kind of a nightmare. Once you're on a local site, you've got both those options still available.
posted by adamrice at 4:35 PM on July 23, 2010
I can't stand IP-based redirection (unless given a choice to opt out.) When working in Germany, having all my search results in German was a real pain in the ass as I don't speak any German.
posted by sanko at 5:15 PM on July 23, 2010
posted by sanko at 5:15 PM on July 23, 2010
The "force you to choose a location at first visit" behavior annoys me too. Some companies' websites will delay the choice page until they actually need to know the information— I can browse the catalog immediately, say, but if I want to know availability or contact a distributor I have to choose a location. This annoys me less.
For geographical localization, which it sounds like is your goal here, the approach that bugs me least is directing a visitor on their first visit based on their IP address, but allowing them to select from a list of tiny flags in the corner (and, if they make an explicit selection, storing that selection in a cookie).
An intermediate route could be to force the user to go through a choice page, but to pre-select or highlight the region that you've guessed based on IP address.
For linguistic localization, every browser I've used in ages and ages sends an informative Accept-Language header, though again allowing a cookie override is good.
I think that trying to guess geography based on language or language based on source IP address is something to avoid except as a last resort fallback (eg, no Accept-Language header, unknown source IP block, etc.) Always remember that language and location are two distinct things.
posted by hattifattener at 8:02 PM on July 23, 2010
For geographical localization, which it sounds like is your goal here, the approach that bugs me least is directing a visitor on their first visit based on their IP address, but allowing them to select from a list of tiny flags in the corner (and, if they make an explicit selection, storing that selection in a cookie).
An intermediate route could be to force the user to go through a choice page, but to pre-select or highlight the region that you've guessed based on IP address.
For linguistic localization, every browser I've used in ages and ages sends an informative Accept-Language header, though again allowing a cookie override is good.
I think that trying to guess geography based on language or language based on source IP address is something to avoid except as a last resort fallback (eg, no Accept-Language header, unknown source IP block, etc.) Always remember that language and location are two distinct things.
posted by hattifattener at 8:02 PM on July 23, 2010
Bad browser detection makes me mad. Especially sites that then set a cookie - so when I try to go back to a different language version - it automatically pops me back to the Japanese site. Grrr. If you want to send me somewhere you think I might be happy - great - but give me an obvious place - maybe in the header - that shows me other language sites I can visit. Put the names of the language in their own language so I'm not trying to figure out what English is in Japanese.
Flags are fine if the information is region specific and not just language specific. If you have a Spanish website you want to use for all of South America - a single flag isn't going to be much help. What language do you get when you click on the Swiss flag? What about Belgium?
posted by Wolfie at 7:37 PM on July 24, 2010
Flags are fine if the information is region specific and not just language specific. If you have a Spanish website you want to use for all of South America - a single flag isn't going to be much help. What language do you get when you click on the Swiss flag? What about Belgium?
posted by Wolfie at 7:37 PM on July 24, 2010
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posted by wwartorff at 3:54 PM on July 23, 2010