Adventures in web globalization, since 2002
I enjoying watching how Western companies localize their websites and products to capitalize on Chinese New Year — the Year of the Sheep (or Goat). Like this gift card from Starbucks China: And this hero image on the Microsoft China home …
When you welcome visitors into your home, you probably don’t usher them directly to the basement. Yet when it comes to websites, this is exactly how many companies treat visitors from around the world. That is, they expect visitors to scroll down to …
Who said the life of a map maker isn’t interesting? Every other day it seems there is another disputed territory, which usually means another disputed name. I’ve already mentioned the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas issue. On the other side of the …
It seems like everyone is running a web survey these days. While I appreciate the importance of asking your website visitors what they think, too many of these surveys are poorly implemented. So here are five tips to consider before …
Speaking of country codes, I’ve been meaning to mention this. Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) now offers users an impressive range of country code domains. Here’s the full list of supported country codes. It appears that Microsoft is using geolocation to enforce …
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 …
Saw on Daring Fireball that Microsoft is previewing its new global website (link). Naturally, I wondered “Where the heck did the global gateway go?” It used to be in the header. But no more. The global gateway has been demoted …
I’m happy to see Microsoft launch a new global gateway on its home page. Here’s a detailed view: Notice how the country/region options are all nicely presented in the native languages. You might wonder about how the list was sorted, with …
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, so take this with a grain of salt. Since Bing launched I’ve been thinking a lot about search engines and how I use them. I’ve got two recent examples that illustrate why I think Bing …
I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget. I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love to hear from others who have tried it. A demo …
Google Translate recently added 11 languages to its impressive portfolio of supported languages. To give you an idea of just how aggressive Google has been in this area, here is a screen grab of Google Translate from 2006: And here …
This comes via my brother via Blogoscoped — Google has made interesting use of the Iceland country code to create a URL that packs a narrative: Check out out here: www.google.is/microsoft.