December 11, 2000

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Three Things To Consider When Taking Your Site Global

By Dawn Gareiss

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or IT managers charged with the task of taking their companies' Web sites global, there are many factors to consider. But three issues are critical, says Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research. As a first step, he suggests figuring out how the local and central offices will cooperate on E-business issues.

"Historically, multinational companies have done very well by decentralizing their operations," Schmitt says. "But the Web poses a threat to that model, because there are opportunities to build economies of scale."

He cites Yahoo Inc.'s strategy as an effective one. The company developed its technology centrally, then left it up to its managers outside the United States to get technology such as chat rooms, auctions, and E-mail up and running in their individual markets, Schmitt says.

The second step Schmitt recommends is to take an inventory of all the software programs relevant to the Web site and make sure they are compliant with Unicode, a relatively new standard for storing content in multiple languages.

Traditional software infrastructures don't always support different language character sets. For example, ASCII is an encoding scheme used to represent the Latin alphabet that uses only 7 or 8 bits, so it can't support languages such as Japanese and Korean that require more bits. Unicode uses 16 bits, so it can represent 65,536 characters.

The final step Schmitt recommends is to develop workflows and processes for managing the multilingual content on an ongoing basis.

"Once you get down to this task, the floodgates are open," he says. Multinational sites will have ongoing material that needs to be localized, and IT shops will need processes for routing that content out of the organization to the translation services provider for translation. The text then has to be validated and published. Says Schmitt, "Most companies want this process as automated as possible."

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Illustration by James Yang

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