Internationalise Your Business
Niyi Adeoshun

Your site and products (or services) are well-designed and advertised for the whole world to see but you find that only visitors from your country can do business with you. Here's how to make your website work around the world.

The present situation

Many website designers today are not taking advantage of the fact that the Web is a global medium breaking down barriers in creating an international community. Most sites are too localised and unless you consider the needs of visitors from other countries, you miss out on a lot of traffic and business. What is the point of displaying your wares to the world if you don't have procedures to process overseas sales? How many countries use zip codes?, how many have counties / states?. When you only put a 0800 or 1-800 number as your only contact number how will people from abroad who can't call these numbers reach you?

The solution

There are two ways of giving a site the widest international audience. The first is to produce a single site that tries to overcome all the problems and is reasonably neutral and the other is the develop individual sites for major geographical markets and hook them on to a main site.

Unless you have a big company like Microsoft or Yahoo, I'm sure you'd rather consider the first option, which is what I will be concentrating on here.

International Design Essentials

If you've decided that your site needs some international appeal, here are a few design and implementation issues to consider.

1. Languages - You can offer different language options from your entrance page, so a visitor can select the one he/she understands. If your services are intended only for English-speaking countries, don't bother about this.
2. Cultural differences - It is not advisable to assume you know your audience totally, so watch the slang you use in your sentences. Another difference to watch out for are sizes and measurements. Clothes and shoe sizes in the US & UK are different; You may put UK size equivalent alongside the US ones in your online brochure.
3. Currencies - The fact that your clients will pay by credit cards doesn't mean they don't want to know how much they are actually paying in their own currency. Provide links to free currency conversion online resources such as X-Rates (www.x-rates.com/calculator.html) for your visitors to use if they so wish. Add a little disclaimer informing the customer that the final billing may vary from this estimate due to fluctuation in the exchange rate. Usually the credit card company will handle the conversion at the going rate at the time of the transaction.
4. Form for all occasions - Your online forms should be made as internationally accessible as possible. Make the customer select a country first, then present them with an appropriate set of fields depending on their choice. Generally make the address lines about four, allow up to 20 digits in the phone field to accommodate international dialling codes. Instead of just writing State: or County use "County, Region or State"

• if you want to attract overseas customers register as .com instead of (or in addition to) say .co.uk, .ng, .fr, .de etc
• Provide information about international delivery charges
• quote prices including and excluding taxes
• If you don't want to do business with folks overseas let them know before they fill the order form

About the author....
Niyi Adeoshun is the webmaster of http://www.nukanweb.com and the publisher of the Christian NETrepreneur newsletter. To subscribe and get a FREE eBook of the month go to http://www.nukanweb.com/newsletter.htm.