Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
You can be a wildly successful global company and still have a poorly localized website. A number of factors determine global success and the website is only one of these factors — unless of course you’re an Internet-based company (you’ll …
Sometimes it’s difficult to see a revolution when you’re standing right in the middle of it. Which is how I still feel sometimes when it comes to web globalization. Web globalization feels at times like slow-moving revolution. Every year, companies …
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. More than ten years ago I set out to create a report that benchmarked global websites. I looked at languages supported. I studied the localized websites. I interviewed the executives …
From Afrikaans to Zulu, the evolution of Google Translate is one of Google’s greatest success stories that few people fully appreciate. Perhaps because Google is reluctant to release usage data (which I imagine is significant). So Google now supports 80 …
I first published the Web Globalization Report Card about 10 years ago. Since then, a number of companies have developed their own internal Report Cards (and I’ve assisted with several). Adobe, in this excellent article on Five Golden Rules to Achieving Agile Localization, …
We studied 12 enterprise technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world. Out of those 12 companies, …
The latest data from IDC show the sharpest decline in PC sales on record. From the release: “Although the reduction in shipments was not a surprise, the magnitude of the contraction is both surprising and worrisome,” said David Daoud, IDC …
During my work for the Web Globalization Report Card I encountered a number of US-focused websites relying on language negotiation (also known as language detection) to make their Spanish-language websites impossible to ignore. Shown above is the overlay used on …
We studied 18 consumer technology websites for the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world. Out of those 18 …
We included 14 automotive and supplier websites in the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. The Web Globalization Report Card is an annual benchmark of how effectively companies internationalize and localize their websites and applications for the world. Out of those …
UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available. I’m pleased to announce the top-scoring websites from the 2013 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the ninth annual edition of the report and it’s always exciting to highlight those …
I’ll admit I knew nothing about WhatsApp before I read that Facebook was about to buy the company (or not). So I went to its website and was pleasantly surprised to see a simple but effective global gateway. Let’s start …
Nike has a brand new website and they’ve made a few navigational changes along the way. For starters, it appears that Nike is now using geolocation to detect the location of the user’s browser. This means Nike is no longer …
Hotels.com scored highly in the 2012 Web Globalization Report Card. At 37 languages (in addition to English), Hotels.com is not the language leader in travel, but it’s near the front of the pack. And the company has been a leader …
The 2012 Web Globalization Report Card is my first attempt at analyzing web globalization in a post-PC world. By post-PC world, I’m referring to a world in which the website adapts not only to the device (PC, tablet, smartphone) but also to …