If you are working on an International site, I'd suggest a 3 level approach - last level optional.
First level: Regional Domains. .com for (U.S) English, .co.uk for (U.K) English, .co.au for whatever we speak in Australia, .co.jp for Japanese, etc. I'd start here for the following reasons: a) I'd hazard a guess that most people around the globe would be familiar with the region domains associated with their country/native language and may even be familiar with the technique of directly switching .co.au to .co.jp to get to the Japanese site. b) if your user's use Google for their search, chances are they'll be doing it from their native region domain - e.g. google.com.au or google.co.jp. When I run a search for "Sony" from these 2 places, the (Australian) English Sony site and Japanese Sony site come back in no. 1 place respectively. c) you have the advantage of another layer of segmentation to play with - language plus region. Second Level: IP Address for best second guess. Say your user is in Japan, but somehow ends up on sony.com.au where everything is in Australian English. Use their IP address to provide a customized link to the Japanese version of the site, but don't force them to go there as they may well be looking for the English/Australian version of the site. The link should, of course, be in the language associated with the IP address. In this example, Japanese. Third level: Manual override. If you feel you need to go even further than this (perhaps to cater for diverse ethnic groups within a single region), then I'd recommend either: a) links (in appropriate language) to the region/language specific sites - in the footer should suffice. b) a combo-box to the same effect. Hope this helps. Cheers. Marcus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42726 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
