How many languages does your website speak? Over the past few years the web has grown 10x faster in countries like Mongolia than it has in the United States. Large companies like Facebook and eBay recognize the importance of a website that is friendly to all languages and cultures. While your site may not be an attempt at an international phenomenon it’s still a good idea to set the stage for that possibility.
There are a lot of simple ways to make your website friendly to a wider multinational audience. A study performed by a British research group reported that only 38.3% of internet users wanted to browse sites written in English. If your site is the kind that would appeal to non-English speakers in any way you should at the very least have separate language landers (if not entire sites) that you can send viewers to.
One particularly helpful fact is that translation services have never been more available or more affordable. They range in quality from Google translate (the free translation service), to full service web linguistic firms that will recreate your site in as many languages as you can name.
We encourage you to consider your website and the audience it can possibly appeal to, then make it as universal as reasonably possible. You never know, it might just become a Mongolian hit.
