1. Fresh and timely contents

How long does it take you to create a completely new section for a new product on your website?

A CMS lets you add contents without sweating over the site’s structure. You don’t need to worry about navigation, links between pages, sitemaps, etc.

Just enter the new contents and hit publish. Any modern content management system lets you dedicate all your time to managing contents, without worrying about anything else.

This means that your marketing and support material is always ready on time and never lag behind the products and services.

2. Getting readers involved

The biggest challenge for any website is getting visitors involved. You want to turn that collection of passive one-time visitors into an active community. A community where people care to visit back, speak their mind and await your message.

That’s easier said than done. So, how can you do it?

Let people influence your website and your business. Let them tell you what they need and show them you care about it. That’s how!

Content management systems have many tools for doing just this. When your website is dynamic, it allows a two way dialog, rather than a dull lecture. Here are some of the tools you can use:

• Comments – in both pages and posts, let your visitors leave you feedback.
• Polls – ask questions, let people respond and show what others have voted.
• Forums – create an open room for discussion where visitors can communicate freely and where everyone sees how well you respond.

3. Make it easy to remember you

Everyone is busy, sometimes a bit too much. People visit you, get excited and then wonder off. It’s not because they’re not interested, but because they have other things that grabbed their attention.

You can help by making it easy to receive updates from you. An email newsletter and an RSS feed are great ways to send your word out and help busy people engaged.

How much more business will you get if five visitors signed up to your newsletter every day?

A content management system will help you create your newsletter with ease. Blog posts can turn into great newsletter contents, delivered without any effort.

4. Make a better impression

A CMS includes basic facilities that will make your site look better, leave a better impressing and do a better job of selling you.

• Spell checking
• Clear navigation
• No broken links
• Clean HTML

Sounds simple, but how much time do you need to spend making sure your site is clean without using a content management system?

5. Rank better in search engines

This is actually a result of all the other advantages. Search engines like the same thing as visitors. They love fresh and updating contents, a clean site free of technical errors and sitemaps.

Since a content management system already delivers all these, both visitors and search engines become happier. A simple thing such as allowing users to contribute contents (in the form of comments) can make your site’s pages rank higher.

Search engines see that it’s fresh, get notified when there’s an update and treat your site as something that needs more attention. Try it and you’ll see for yourself.

Want to move to a CMS?

We’re running a program that helps migrate existing sites to content management system. It doesn’t matter how it’s built, we can put it on a CMS in no time.

The two content management systems we’re working on are WordPress and Drupal. Each has its own strengths.

It’s something that we’ve started doing a few months ago, when clients asked us to translate static HTML sites or sites built with their own PHP. We saw that it’s just way easier to spend a few days migrating to a strong CMS and continue from there than invent the wheel each time.

Interested? You can leave a comment here or (better) contact us.

When you build your site, it’s important to keep in mind that one day, you may need to translate it. This means that the same pages will have to display nicely when the text changes. I’d like to talk about a few problems that we see repeating. Understanding those problems amounts to 90% of the solution. The rest is common sense.

Images and Flash as text

I’ve already covered this issue before and I’m far from being the only one talking about it. While the W3 guidelines suggest supplying alternative texts for images, you can usually skip the images altogether and achieve the same visual design using just text and CSS. It may take a bit more effort, but the rewards are great.

When translating images, translators can only supply the text that needs to appear. Then, a graphic artist needs to rebuild all images to include the translation. It’s pretty obvious that this kind of work is much more time consuming (and prone to errors) than just translating text.

Fixed size elements

All too often, graphics designers like to set exact size for elements on the screen. It starts with fixed sizes for fonts and continues with exact width and height for boxes (DIVs, table cells, etc.). With some luck such a website would look the same on different browsers (although normally they don’t). However, once translated, things tend to break up completely.

German is typically 1.5 times longer than English. So, how would it be possible to squeeze in more characters to the exact same area?

What happens with such formatting is that text spills out, boxes run over each other and nothing looks as is should. To avoid it, always go for flexible layouts. Keep objects positioned relative to each other and not in absolute locations. Never assume any relation between the size of text and images and never use cell height.

Then, test. Try your website with a different font size and see what happens. If you can increase the size by at least 50% and then reduce it by at least 50% and things still display correctly, you’re in good shape.

Sentences that are broken by HTML entities

Consider this paragraph:

“Trucks are larger than cars so they weigh more.”

It’s pretty easy to translate. Now, what happens if I put this into a table, like this one:

<table><tr><td>Trucks are larger than</td>
<td>cars so they weigh more.</td></tr></table>

What I did is take that one sentence and place it into two table rows. Maybe I did that because I tried to make the two parts of that sentence appear one below the other. Who knows?

The result is, I now have two sentence fragments to translate, each making very little sense by itself. Even worse is the translation might now fit so nicely into that structure that I arranged.

The solution is obvious. Just don’t do it. Use other means to style the page, just don’t force texts into this kind of structure.

Conclusions

Building a website that’s easy to translate is very simple. All that it takes is attention to the fact that text size may change. Running a simple experiment on your site before you have it translated can save a lot of time, money and stress.

ICanLocalize Translator, the Drupal translation management tool, is now offered for free to non-profit organizations, to be used as a translation collaboration tool.

Many non-profit organizations build their website using open source content management systems. It’s not a surprise that leading open source projects, such as Ubuntu and government sites such as Recovery.org are powered by Drupal. Powerful features, ease of use and being free make it a great choice.

But, what happens when these sites need to speak several languages? It’s only natural to expect Recovery.gov to speak both English and Spanish. Canonical, offering Ubuntu with full localization to dozens of languages, might want to offer its website in more than just English.

Why do we see such popular sites only in English?

Translation is an ongoing task. As long as new contents are created and old contents update, translation must continue. The cost of managing the translation often exceeds the cost of doing the translation. While it’s possible to assign different translators and even whole teams of translators to work on a Drupal site, translation management often falls on the shoulders of a single admin – already overloaded with work.

ICanLocalize Translator is a Drupal module which solves this problem. It releases site admins from any management work due to translation. It checks which pages need to be translated from scratch and which pages need update. Then, it sends the right contents for translation. In essence, it allows running a multilingual Drupal site without spending any time managing translation.

Authors can write contents in their language and entire site’s translation is handled by the system.

Pricing options for commercial use

1. Full turnkey solution costs just 0.07 USD per word. ICanLocalize provides the translators and makes the translation system available for no additional charge.
2. Clients can use their own translators and pay 5 USD per page for using the system.

And now, ICanLocalize Translator is offered for free to non-profits!

We’ve just added a 3rd plan for using the translation system. ICanLocalize Translator is made 100% free to be used as a translation collaboration tool for non profit organizations.

We’re using open source tools to create and run our business and want to contribute something back. The least we can do is make our own translation tool available for free for the exact same organization who’s work has made it possible for us to built our service. We hope that many open source projects and the organizations running them would take advantage of this offer and make their websites accessible to the world.

How to take advantage of this offer?

Webmasters, marketing folks and anyone involved in running the website are encouraged to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to give a private tour of the system.

You can read more about it in drupal-translation.com, where we teach how to build a multilingual website using Drupal and how to use ICanLocalize Translator to automate the translation process.

A resource for Drupal webmasters

Anyone building a multilingual site with Drupal could find something useful in Drupal Translation. It starts with the basics, including which modules to install and how to configure them and continues to more advanced material such as taxonomy and CCK translation.

What’s in the guide?

The i18n module modifies the site’s database structure and many of the admin pages. Its features are distributed across different sections, such as content administration, content entry and display setup. This guide will walk you through the multilingual features, explain the difference between various options and show how to set things up coherently.

In addition to the i18n module, Drupal Translation also introduces the ICanLocalize Translator module, which works together with i18n to facilitate the translation itself by sending contents to translators and storing translation results back in the Drupal database.

Drupal-Translation.com will always be ‘work in progress’

As Drupal and the localization modules update, so does Drupal Translation.

New, more advanced material is constantly added and contents update as new Drupal versions are released.

Available in English, German and Spanish

Drupal Translation itself is a Drupal site. Its multilingual contents are maintained using the i18n module and translation is being done using ICanLocalize Translator, which is currently available in Beta.

Today, everyone wants to benefit from new technologies and build dynamic websites which interact with visitors. There’s a good reason too. When visitors can communicate with you, via your website, they become more involved. When visitors are active, there’s a much greater chance that they also become your customers.

Evaluate your needs and capabilities

1) Decide what you want your website to do

This seems trivial, but is often forgotten. Different website building platforms have different capabilities. These often include:

• Static pages
• News (a.k.a, a blog)
• Forums
• Members only sections
• A support center
• Resources for download

2) Evaluate your technical skills and how much you’re willing to spend

Do you know this saying?  – “there’s no such thing as a free meal“. It’s true today just as it was when it was last conceived – a long time ago.

Even if you use free software to build your website, you’re still going to pay for it. It’s going to cost you both time and money. We use the standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack to build our sites and still pay substancial sums to keep things up and running.

Evaluate correctly and honestly how much you’re willing to spend, both in terms of your own time and in terms of money before you choose a web development platform. We’ll get to that back in a minute.

3) Decide how long you’re willing to wait

Some platforms have a very active community with excellent folks that you can hire right away and get started. Other platforms are less popular, with a smaller community. You may end up with excellent results but need to wait a bit more until it’s ready.

It’s important that you come prepared with a realistic schedule.

Choose a platform

We’ve been doing extensive work on two great web development platforms:

• WordPress
• Drupal

Of course, there are other excellent alternatives, but I’d like to talk about what we’re intimately familiar with.

WordPress as a great Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress started a few years ago as a blogging platform and has evolved into a full featured CMS.

What makes WordPress a great CMS, and a great tool for building complete websites:

1. It’s dead easy to install and use.
2. Got thousands of free and non-free templates (see some ideas for WordPress CMS themes).
3. Got thousands of excellent plugins (check out this list of plugins that turn WordPress into a CMS).
4. It’s editor is probably best in kind and keeps getting better.

What’s missing from WordPress when used to build full websites:

1. No multilingual content support (you can get around this by using ICanLocalize Translation System).
2. No built in facilities for building usable site-wide navigation (among other solutions, you can use our WordPress CMS plugins).

Bottom line:

WordPress can be a great solution for building complete websites. It’s great for small businesses who want a great looking and highly functional website but don’t want to spend thousands of dollars creating and running it.

A single person can be in change for site maintenance and content management. For a small fee, you’ll find great web designers who will build a WordPress theme for you which will make your business website look professional.

Drupal – a top notch CMS

When people think about CMS, the first thing that comes to mind is Joomla!. Why are we talking about a less known system such as Drupal?

Drupal has been designed for heavy lifting. As such, it places an emphasis on infastructure, sometimes willing to sacrifice ease of use. Here is what makes Drupal great:

1. It can do anything you’d ever dream from a website.
2. It never breaks or wrinkles.
3. Once set up, running a Drupal based site is as smooth as it gets.
4. There aren’t any shortcuts, meaning, everything is always in place. If you hired a developer to set up your Drupal site and then changed developer, he’ll have no trouble at all picking up where it left off. This isn’t a minor feature for a business website!
5. It comes built in to handle multilingual contents. If you want to further simplify things and automate the translation process, you can try the ICanLocalize Translator module for Drupal.

The obvious cons for building a site with Drupal come from its nature:

1. Unless you’re a Drupal professional, there’s no way you can set up a Drupal site.

That’s it really and it’s not a very bad thing. Letting a pro create and administer your site is probably a pretty good decision for any business, regardless of its budget.

Bottom line:

If you can afford it and need the strengh Drupal affords, it’s an excellent choice and any website.

What’s WordPress MU (WPMU)?

WPMU is an extension for WordPress, allowing to run multiple WordPress sites from a single install and with a single administration login. We’ve already written here about how to install WordPress for multiple language blogs. WPMU is a much more systematic approach for running multiple blogs from the same code, sharing plugins and themes.

Besides sharing the same install directory, WPMU includes essential management for administrating multiple blogs from one central admin panel.

How can WPMU help build multi-lingual websites?

This is what we’ll do:

• Run each language as an independent blog within the WPMU install.
• Use the ICanLocalize Translation system to synchronize between contents in different languages.

If you want to see exactly how to do this, follow this detailed guide for using WPMU to run multilingual websites.

What’s good with this approach?

The best thing about building your multi-lingual WordPress site with WPMU is that everything just falls into place.

WordPress is designed to serve contents in a single language. Some plugins aim to provide multi-lingual support by duplicating tables and adding custom fields. These things work, but require major changes throughout WordPress. As a result, they’re very sensitive to WordPress updates and often cause conflicts with other plugins or with code in themes.

When you run each language in its own blog, everything works as intended. Each blog runs a single language, without any changes to the normal tables. The collection of blogs, implemented by WPMU provides the multi-lingual experience.

WPMU can be used to create full multi-lingual websites, not just blogs!

WordPress, although started as a blogging platform can be used to create full websites. We’re using it for our developers site, and our digital photography software site. WPMU makes it possible to do the same and create great multi-lingual sites.

A recent entry in our developers site shows how to use WordPress as CMS, by setting a static home page and assigning the blog page to a different page. The same thing can be applied to WPMU, when each blog instance is serving a different language.

No widely spoken language is spoken the same everywhere, US and UK English, French and, to a larger extent, Spanish. Each region it is spoken in adds their own flavour to it, changing accents, meanings of words and grammatical constructions.

This results is what may sometimes seem like a completely new language. Volado – Spanish past perfect of fly. Are you sure? In Columbia it means angry, in El Salvador it is an object. So how do we request a translation and ensure the document will be easily read by Spanish speakers from so many different parts of the world?

There is no correct or better Spanish; we simply try to use a Spanish which is comprehensible to all, despite what is spoken in a particular region day to day. Man rather than lad, guy, dude or bro. This concept of a standard Spanish variation has not surprisingly been named “Neutral Spanish”.

I have used the word simply, but unfortunately it is not all that simple. Finding a neutral ground in anything takes time, research and sacrifice. Most difficult of all in this case, is the impossibility of forming certain grammatical structures in a neutral way.

What’s so different between Latin American and European Spanish?

The most known example of this is the singular “you” which, in Spain, is translated to “tu”, but in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Central American countries, it translates to “vos”, while some Colombians tend to use the formal alternative “usted”. The problem here is that all three pronouns require different verb conjugations and that at least one of the three versions will always sound a bit awkward in any given Spanish speaking country.

Also keep in mind that when using it, it is necessary to avoid slang, unexplained abbreviations and issues that are specific to a region. This can make it seem more technical and formal or impersonal, but depending on the text, it is usually how we want it anyway, to ensure it can reach a wide variety of audiences from different regions.

The concept does not only refer to written Spanish, in fact, many of the differences between Spanish variants are in pronunciation and not in the text itself.

The common ground – Neutral Spanish

Neutral Spanish has found a way to tackle this problem. The two most popular Latin American television channels in the US are Telemundo and Univision. Telemundo has coached their telenovela (literally TV novels) – soap opera – stars in speaking with Neutral Spanish accents. The accent is something akin to the Mexican accent; it is between the slow murmur of Central America, the elongated vowel sounds of Argentina and the fast, terse accent of Columbia.

Univision, its competitor, has also coached their actors to speak in a similar accent, but it does not oblige them to so, as they are in Telemundo. Maybe it should think about it – Telemundo has 80% of the Latin American TV audience. The key here is inclusion. There are few people who feel left out because they don’t understand certain jokes or expressions that are used in the Telenovela, and this is also the key to a successful Spanish translation.

Know what to ask for

Like a request for anything the rules must be stated before the game commences. The translator must be made aware that the text will be read by people whose background, cultures, sense of humour and even tolerance levels diverge greatly and a middle ground must be researched and found. Once this balance has been struck, the Spanish speaking audience possibilities are only as limited as the variations themselves.

For website translation, unless your content is aimed at a very specific country, Neutral Spanish is a safe bet. Your Spanish pages will read natural to people around the world, making everyone feel right at home.

Liza D’Arcy is linguistic coordinator of the Spanish Army at the Valencian barracks in Valencia, Spain. She also works as a translator for ICanLocalize and specializes in social sciences.

What does ‘text as images’ mean?

A web page can contain many different elements, such as texts, graphics, Flash and other embedded objects. It’s possible to create things that appear the same way using different techniques.

For example, the following ‘Download’ button:

Text version	Graphics version
DOWNLOAD

Although these two buttons look very similar, they are in fact quite different. One is the text ‘Download’, formatted to appear like 3D button and the other is an image, in which the word ‘Download’ is drawn.

Images that contain text make website translation a difficult task. The translator cannot reproduce the ‘translated’ images. Instead, the translator will provide translation for the text in the images, which can be used by the graphics artist who created the original image to create images with translated texts.

Images that contain text also make websites unclear to search engines. Search engines cannot understand the text that appears in images and don’t fully trust alternative texts that we supply. So, they prefer not to serve text in images as search results.

Unfortunately, text in images is typically found in the site’s most critical elements, such as in the tagline, navigation and calls for action. The reason for this is the graphics designer who built the website paid special importance to appearance and chose to make the most important parts of the website look as pretty as possible. As a result, their usability is the lowest, both for human visitors and for search engines.

Graphics designers like images with texts

Clearly, most graphics designers understand the problems associated with placing texts in images. What is their motivation for doing this in new designs?

Web design usually begins as an image. A graphics designer creates a drawing of how the page would appear. They use great programs such as PhotoShop, to deliver prototypes and create the final design.

When the design is complete, the graphics designer needs to break up the single image into small elements and code them as HTML. They try to convert things to HTML and CSS and use tables and DIVs to create the page structure. The graphics artist usually prefers to keep key elements in their original graphics form, so that they look exactly as intended – on every web browser and every PC.

So, you can see that graphics designers actually see it as converting graphics into text and not text into images. They start with an entire page as an image and gradually convert it to text.

What can you do?

The customer isn’t always right, but he’s always the customer. When you order web design work, you may not know what the best way is for doing things, but you can demand how certain things should be done. It doesn’t matter if the designer can do it prettier or even if you’re in full agreement – more important is that you know what to request.

• Don’t include any text in images. The only exception can be your logo and company/product name.
• Produce valid HTML (one that validates correctly at least using the w3 validator).
• Avoid heavy graphics (the total size of a health web page should not be more than 60Kbyte, including images and Javascript).

There’s other things that are important, but these three are essential an non-negotiable.

When you translate your website, you’re actually duplicating its contents in multiple languages. So, it’s a good idea to fix it up before doing that. The first major fixup you should do is to make your site clearer for search engines – the fancy name for this is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Think spider!

Search engines go from one page to the other, following links. They use computer programs called “spiders” to do that. These programs do their best to understand every page, in order to deliver correct results when people do searches.
If you make it easy on these spiders, they’ll understand you better and be able to show your website in relevant searches.

Speak the spiders’ language

Spiders read HTML. That’s the language of the web. HTML uses tags to describe different parts of the page. For example:

If you build your page with tables and place text in images, this is what it may look like for spiders:

Welcome to our home page
|| Products || Download || Order || Support
IMG is a great image
converter tool
IMG

What do you make of it? Not much, do you?

You can create the same page using an <h1> header and list. Then, it would look like this for the spiders:

= Image Conversion Software =
 * Products
 * Download
 * Order
 * Support
ImageVerter is a great image converter tool. Download now!

That’s a bit better, isn’t it?

The page would look the same, but now, it’s built with tags that convey information. I used the heading (h1) tag to tell what the page heading is, used a list for the main sections and avoided placing text inside images. When a spider sees this page, it knows what I’m talking about and can deliver it when people search for image conversion tools.

• Put descriptive text in your page’s <title> <h1> and <h2> tags.
• Look at your page without style sheets and images and see that it’s still clear.

Include texts that people might be looking for

You can use a keyword research tool to find what people are looking for. Normally, people already have a pretty good idea what their main keywords would be – without doing much research, but some digging around will probably reveal search terms you didn’t think about.
For example, if you’re thinking about ‘digital photos’ than a keyword research tool would probably also suggest ‘digital picture’ and ‘digital photograph’.
If you include different keyword alternatives in your text, search engines will spot them and can show your page for these searches.
A few years ago people obsessed about keyword density. Magical numbers flew in the air, speculating what would work best. As search engines get more and more intelligent, you can (and probably should) write your web copy in conversational language and avoid over stuffing them with keywords.

Keep pages focused on a single topic

This isn’t really a tip for Search Engine Optimization. Your visitors would appreciate it if every page talked about a single thing and presented it with as few words as possible.
Search engines need to understand what the page is all about. If you’ve got a page about Fly Fishing and you’re adding a whole paragraph about your Safari Tours, you’re just confusing everyone. Keep one page talking about your fishing expeditions and another on the safari tours. Each page would be short on on-topic.

What Google says about it

Google publishes plenty of good reading on SEO. You can start with this article on creating a Google-friendly site.

What’s your experience?

Do you do your SEO yourself, or is a professional doing it for you?
Tell us about how it’s going!

127 Characters or less

European characters can also be encoded with a single byte (8 bits) per character. Older version of Windows used to do that. The mapping between the character code and its graphical representation is called the code page. If your application doesn’t support Unicode characters, it can still be localized, but would run properly only in one language. That’s because the code page on a PC can only be set to one value at a time.

More than 127 characters

Supposing you want your application to speak several languages, you’d need more than 127 different characters. This could be the case if you want a single build to support several languages. It could also happen if you just want to support an Asian language that has more than 127 characters to start with (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc).

So, what do you do?

The best alternative would be to use Unicode characters. The remaining question is how to encode Unicode strings in the application.

Just a small reminder: your source files are stored byte by byte. If you’ve got Unicode strings, they must be encoded as bytes. Then, during run-time, they would be decoded back to Unicode.

Different encodings for Unicode characters

Try this text document with non-English characters. Open it with Notepad (which comes standard in Windows). You’ll see some texts in different languages (English, Spanish and Hebrew). Now, click on File->Save as…

The save dialog asks you which encoding to use. The default is UTF-8, which is what this file was saved in. If you try switching it to ANSII and saving you’ll get an error message. That’s because the file’s characters don’t fit into the 127 ANSII character set.

Notepad can encode the file as ANSI, UTF-8, Big Endian Unicode (Motorola PowerPC) and Little Endian Unicode (Intel Pentium). Try saving the file using different encoding and open it in a binary or byte editor. You’ll see the same text encoded using different ways.

UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Format (8). It uses sequences of bytes, of different lengths, to encode different characters. The nice thing is that English characters map to themselves. This means that plain text English text is valid UTF-8.

Bonus round – character encoding and markup languages

Supposing you’ve got some Unicode text, encoded as bytes that needs to be included in a markup languages (like HTML, XHTML or XML), what’s the right order of things?

Here’s the answer:

Unicode text <> Byte encoding <> Markup escape <> Markup

So, if you’re going to place Unicode texts in an HTML file, this is what you’ll do:

1. Encode the text as UTF-8.
2. Apply the HTML escape (for example, replace < with &lt; and & with &amp;).
3. Wrap inside the HTML tags

You’ll also place the encoding meta data in the HTML head section, so that the parser (browser) later knows how to decode it:

<meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

When the browser gets the HTML, it will do the same thing, in reverse:

1. Parse the HTML and extract texts
2. Undo the HTML escape
3. Decode the byte string as UTF-8 and produce Unicode text

The same idea applies for other escape techniques. If you’re encoding a URL, URL encoding will be required.

Let’s talk about it

What’s your experience with different character encoding? Any issues you had to tackle?