Thoughts on multilingual web design

The moment you upload your meticulously constructed web pages onto the internet, you’re global. Internet users from Nebraska and New York, to Norway and the Netherlands all have equal access to the very same information you upload.If all you’re looking to do with your website or blog is to develop a strong global following, then you might just be fine with your English language website: after all, over half of the European Union (EU) alone speak English to some degree.However, if your plan is to build a successful, profitable international online enterprise, then you’ll need to plan how you are going to adapt your website for the international arena: after all, three quarters of the world’s population speak no English whatsoever, and those that do speak English, at least as a second language, still prefer to do business in their native tongue.With that in mind, here are three considerations you must make when designing your website – aspects that will make your site far easier to adapt for other languages in the future.UnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard that enables computers to consistently display text in most of the alphabets and writings systems of the world. It has been adopted by leaders from the IT industry such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft…and countless others. It is supported in most of the standard operating systems and internet browsers and most popular design applications (Dreamweaver, Front Page etc) facilitate the development of Unicode web pages.Unicode is compatible with over 90 scripts, and has a repertoire of over 100,000 separate characters. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode that is familiar to most programmers. It is the best option when creating websites for international markets, as it allows you to use characters from many different alphabets and languages.In the simplest terms, use Unicode if you plan to adapt your website for non-English speaking countries.ColorsWhen you d

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