The trend of American companies building Spanish-language Web sites is now in full swing. We are now seeing health care organizations getting into the act, with Delta Dental of California now offering a Spanish site:
I always find it interesting to observe how Web sites incorporate their first localized Web sites. They rarely revise their navigation menu to point to the new site; instead, they create a special button or graphic that points to the page. Navigation almost always comes later, and even then this “global gateway” does not become a major element until there are several localized sites involved.
As shown here, the Spanish site maintains the same layout:
I would have recommended pulling the text out of the graphics to save time in localization. Assuming that additional language-specific sites are created, the less “embedded text” you have, the less work the localization will be.
Still, I’m happy to see more organizations dedicating resources to Spanish localization. With 40 million native-language speakers in the U.S., it’s just a matter of time before most organizations follow suit.
