Make your Website Appeal to International Users
Posted Under: Website Usability
What can you do to make your website appeal to international users, as well as potential domestic clients?
The Internet has become the primary source of information for individuals worldwide, and as the number of Internet users increase daily, it has become necessary for webmasters to improve their websites to keep visitors interested.
You can make your website appeal to international users in number of ways; some of which are listed below for your consideration.
Availability
The primary concern of any webmaster is to insure that your website is compatible with all web browsers. Make sure your website passes the HTML, and CSS validation tests.
Make your website appeal to international users who are disabled, or could have a difficult time accessing your site. If you adhere to the web standards, you should have no problem with this.
Provide simple, straight forward website navigation. Don’t get cute with popovers, designer boxes, etc., keep it simple! If you have to stop to figure out where to go; it’s too complicated!
Make sure that your status bars are prominently displayed in all windows.
Page Appearance
Keep your fonts standard. To be safe, use Arial fonts, or Verdana as a second choice.
Make sure that your font color contrasts with your page background. The font color not only affects how quickly a user can read the content of your web page; it can also cause eye strain in the reader, when outlandish color schemes are used.
Contrast between the background and text colors is extremely important. Black text on a white background, is pretty much the standard, for worldwide readability.
When you use color, there should be enough contrast to make the web page readable; and not too much to cause a distraction to the reader.
Use standard link, and mouse hover colors in your hyperlinks. Don’t get fancy with your hyperlink colors, or you could lose clicks from international users.
When using graphics, be frugal. Use just enough graphics to support what you are trying to convey to your users in your content.
Over use of graphics are often the cause of slow loading web pages that turn off visitors.
Make your content specific, brief, and focused. Don’t wast people’s time by being verbose. Get to the point!
Performance
You can make your website appeal to international users by keeping down the bandwidth.
Not everyone internationally has access to fast Internet connections, and when you design your web page for speed, your readers will appreciate your website all the more.
If you divide your web page into several tables, instead of putting the whole page inside one table, your site will load much faster.
Your aim as a web designer, should be to create the fastest possible loading website, for the slowest connection speed.
Make sure that the navigation features are present at all times, regardless of the window size.
Bugs
To avoid having bugs in your system, set up the body of your text with relative font sizes.
There are users like myself, with poor eyesight, that need to adjust the font size through my settings for better readability. The relative recommended value would be either; font-size: 100% or font-size: -1.
Your URL should contain no punctuations or spaces, and should be short. Users should be able to copy and paste a URL without having to wrap it.
Establish redirects to avoid breaking bookmarks and links.
When you make your website appeal to international users by implementing these suggestions; you have a greater probability of attracting, and keeping, international visitors on your website.
