Things to Keep in Mind When Designing blog for a Global Audience

Designing blog for a global audience

Every day more and more businesses realize how important it is to catch up with world globalization and it is even more important you should be ready for localization if you are serious and determined to reach your goals.

Here are the things to keep in mind when designing blog for a global audience.

Building websites preintended for a global audience is more than just a necessity nowadays.

Before introducing the things to keep in mind when designing for a global audience let us understand why do you need to design blog for a global audience?

Your visitors are the reason you create your blog, website and any other profile. So you need to make a research on your audience.

Ask yourself:

• Who are you designing for?
• What they love?
• Who are you speaking to?
• Where they live?

Yes it might seem a bit controversial but you may ask yourself why you need to design blog for a global audience, and not target one specific location.

But have some stats that will help you to understand the importance.

The number of internet subscribers worldwide is already well over 3 billion. On top of that, by 2017, mobile phone subscriptions will reach 4.77 billion globally.

Over half the world’s population has internet access.

That means all those people will have potential access to whatever it is you are introducing on your blog, whatever you are selling, as long as your website is set up in a way that can handle them.

English is the most popular language on the internet, but even so, a mere 26.3% of searches and transactions happen in English. So if you’re not factoring in designing for a global audience, you’re clearly limiting your market share.

Create user friendly design

One of the essential things to keep in mind when designing blog for a global audience is to create user friendly design. In simple words, your design should be as easy as possible in terms of navigation and layout. Choose a top tab design along with horizontal navigation making usability user friendly and universal for languages that read left to right and right to left.

Another point to bear in mind is that you should make sure you have enough flexibility in your image and text boxes so that you can change these when required without any difficulty.

Use Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard that allows for the consistent representation of text, no matter the script being used. For example, English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese are all catered for by Unicode. It works whether the language reads left-to-right (LTR) or right-to-left (RTL).

Unicode has over a hundred thousand characters and more than ninety different scripts. UTF-8 is the most common character-encoding for Unicode because it’s a variable-length encoding that represents all characters in the Unicode character set.

UTF-8 is now the default encoding system for websites, so by adopting Unicode, you’ll ensure that your site is compatible with just about any language.

Don’t forget about responsive design

When you wander around the things to keep in mind when designing blog for a global audience, responsive design is just the right thing.

Even more, responsive design is a must for any website globalized or not.

However, if you’re planning to target users in other countries, it would be right to do your research on the types of devices they most commonly use to access the Internet (since your optimization and testing process might not typically include them). You can use your own Google Analytics data to start this research.

Make keyword research.

You know content becomes worthy and high quality when optimized with keywords. But among the things to keep in mind when designing blog for a global audience, the globally optimized keywords on your site are what come to the fore at first.

Instead, this is more about finding a term that’s globally acceptable since the word order or choice might be off in other countries.

Don’t forget about geotargeting

If you’re designing a WordPress site for a global audience, don’t forget to use geotargeting. With these sorts of plugins, you can more effectively target specific geographic regions or countries, deliver geo specific content to visitors, and much more.

GeoTargeting Lite: WordPress Geolocation

might be a great tool for that. Geo Targeting plugin for WordPress will let you create dynamic content based on your users country.

With a simple shortcode, you will be able to specify which countries are capable of seeing the content.

It is also compatible with WordPress Popups Plugin. You can now geotarget your popups.

The plugin saves into its own cache the country you are in. If you need to test for different countries, you have two options:

You can pass a country iso code in the URL like this:

http://demo.com/some-page/?geot_debug=US“

Or you can add in wp-config.php the following to use your own VPN

define(‘GEOT_DEBUG’,true);“

Don’t ignore cultural nuances

It is easy to wrongly assume that all markets take to the same language similarly. In reality, they may have very different attitudes to what is acceptable.

Don’t forget about translation

Yes, a multilingual site is no more considered something rare rather than is a necessity when talking about designing blog for a global audience. Yes, using services of translators might not always be on a budget but you know WordPress has some solution for every occasion.

The Weglot Translate plugin

is quite great for this purpose.

It automatically creates the international drop down option at the top of your site, letting visitors know where to access the translated version.

It’s SEO compatible and provides translations into more than 60 languages.

And you can also use the premium service if you want to procure personalized translations from Weglot. Another great premium option is WPML, which offers a similar service.

Polylang

TranslatePress

Translate WordPress with GTranslate

are also handy tool when it comes to rendering your multilingual content to the international audience.

All of them are highly compatible with WordPress powered sites and provide a unique dashboard to edit translations or purchase professional translations to ensure the quality of translations.

With any of them you can translate your site into a multilingual website with multiple languages in minutes without doing any coding.