Website Translation - Part 1

A   good content strategy is built around understanding who your customers are. This enables you to present your message in  the best way possible.  When it comes to website  text, you’d better be speaking in the primary language of your customer.

Going global?

If your customers and clients tend to be in the same region  as you are, the idea of translating your website into different languages might  seem over the top.  A quick check of your  weekly stats will show a few visits from Poland and Saudi Arabia, but they’re  unlikely to be writing checks.  However, when you consider that America has the world’s  second largest Spanish speaking population, & in places like New Mexico, Spanish  is spoken by over 40% of the people (with California not far behind,) you  start to wonder if you’re missing an opportunity.

No ghost in the machine

Technology has come a long way and there are now several  sites and plugins that will translate your site automatically for you –  fantastic – install the plugin, hit translate and voila! – Global business here  you come.

Stop!

The thing about machine translation, actually, all  translation come to think of it – is that you have no idea what your site now  reads like in the foreign language.  This  is a big problem.  The reality of machine  translation nowadays is that it tends to make you sound like a three year old  on acid. 

Fish tank handbag shandy – Buy Me!

Your website is not like you on vacation where your charm  and winning ways can get you past incorrect grammar and inappropriate noun  selection.  Your website has one  opportunity to present your case and you’d better be relying on something  better than a machine – an example from Scotland:

A fire brigade leaflet produced for Strathclyde Fire and  Rescue Service offering advice on how to escape from your home.

Written in English the text read,

“Never jump straight out of a window, lower yourself onto cushions”

This was translated into Urdu, the result was very  interesting. It read…

“Never jump out of a window straight. Put yourself on a  donkey and come down.”

(Courtesy of Le Blog)

You get what you pay for

It is better to have no translation than one that presents you  as an idiot.  If you’re thinking of  offering your site in a different language because it is cheap to do, stop.  Translation is a very human skill and as a result,  you get what you pay for.  Cultural  nuances aside, grammar and spelling are just as important regardless of what  language you present in;  are you sure  your assistant's second cousin who has been to Mexico is going to nail all that?

We recently launched a French version of a site we did for  an international US corporation who wanted to consolidate their UK, French and  Czech businesses.  Although the French site  used exactly the same architecture and code, it took several additional weeks to  deliver due to linguistically derived modifications to the page text.   Sometimes things that look good and read well  in one language just don’t, literally, translate.

Work with Professionals

We recently had the pleasure of spending some time with Nathalie  Schon, a professional translator with expertise in English, French, German and  Italian.  Originally from Metz, France,  Nath manages to move round the world, working remotely for companies like Sony  as she translates their movies from the beach in Hawaii.  Our next two posts on translation will cover  a recent interview we did with Nath on the challenges of website translation.

Make us laugh

Got any insane translation cock-ups you want to share –  leave them in the comments below.

Radiohead King of Limbs - Marketing and Design

This post is about marketing and web page design - the takeaways are:

• If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you
• If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it
• Set expectations and then over deliver

Marketing (Part 1)

Radiohead are notorious for their lack of communication, they have the best signal to noise ratio of any band I know.  This means that when they do communicate, people comment on it.

The band announced the release of their new album with a simple blog post on their website on Monday.  I don't regularly visit Radiohead's website, but I found out about the record’s existence from a news aggregator on Tuesday.

Marketing (Part 2)

I read eleven music related aggregators and I receive three of them in email format, the rest are RSS feeds. I scan their headlines every morning and if something catches my eye I dig deeper.

Pretty much every one carried the story about Radiohead's new album and in every format I was able to click through to the band's website.  Once I had verified the information and pre-ordered the record, I then tweeted to my network about it.  Over the next two days I saw people in my own network going through the same experience and tweeting and blogging about the record to their network.

Design (Part 1)

When I arrived on the King of Limbs website I immediately knew that I was dealing with the band:

Band name (brand) is big and easily identified – the text is simple and straightforward and the graphic immediately funnels your attention to the purchase process.  Note how there is no menu navigation – there is only one way off this page and you choose it by identifying which market you are – brilliant!

Design (Part 2)

There are two products on offer – the higher margin one is presented first, but again – look how clean and simple the language is.  Look at the relative size between the title and the text and the information delivered.  There are only two visible buttons on this page – the pre order and order button – there is no doubt what the purpose of this page is.

Although menu navigation does make an appearance it is super simple – no drop down menus, no multiple options, simple and clean.  The rest of the purchase flow is just as easy – there are no “up sells”, no additional offers and no superfluous requests for information.

Marketing (Part 3)

When Radiohead announced the new album on the 14th, they said it would be available on Saturday 19th.

When I woke up this morning and looked at my network on Twitter I saw that people were already listening to the album.

http://twitter.com/thebluesage/status/38611832986025984

I immediately went to the site and saw that they had released a day early, I downloaded the album, started listening and immediately told my network the news.

By exceeding the expectations that they themselves had set, they delighted me and made me feel good about the whole experience.

Takeaways

If you have something that people want, they will tell their network about you

If you have something that people want, make it easy for them to find and purchase it

Set expectations and then over deliver

Simple huh!

lauren // associates

Last week saw the launch of the latest web site from Kilted Chaos:

lauren // associates - non profit consulting

For this write up we’re going to look at some of the key design elements that we addressed when putting the site together:

White Space, Use of Color, Navigation as Information and Images.

White Space

People scan your home page – they make an assessment of what’s there and what’s important in the first few seconds.  If it is busy with lots of text and flashy things, you’re making it harder for people to quickly identify what they’re looking for.

The approach here is to remove anything that can’t be represented through navigation off the front page and leave a simple core message.  The intent is to leave the eye free to take in the logo and tag line – and then wonder what the hell the green circle is for.

Use of Color

Color is awesome – used sparingly it is like a policeman for the eye: “Go directly to here – do not look at anything else.”  Aside from the big green circle – we use green to highlight certain words: Lauren (the name of the company), Profit (something that everybody wants – especially people in non profit!) and Changing (‘cos if they weren’t looking to change something about their business – they wouldn’t be on the site!)

The purpose of the circle is to create an independent platform within the space that can be used to spotlight text information.  The circle draws the eye to the words running around it and a mouse over effect pulls the explanatory text into the space.  The interactive nature of the tool encourages the user to try out the other words and in doing so get exposed to a deeper level of information about the company.

Navigation as Information

Over the years I have found that I learn just as much about a site from the navigation as I do from the content.  Navigation will tell you very quickly what the site priorities are and shape how you as a visitor move through it.

The primary navigation on Lauren Associates presents a visitor with 4 options - in effect saying: this is what we do, this is what we think, this is what we are about, and you can get us here.  Nice and simple and no horrible multi-level drop downs that you have to scan in order to work out where you’re going.

Secondary navigation shouldn’t detract from the primary message but should make it easy for the visitor to get around the site.  We used the mouse over effect on the front page but you can only really do that once - for the inside pages, the icon driven “micro-menu” sits nicely on the top right, we could have used small font text but the icons just look cooler!

An Image says a thousand words

And those words are often “this site blows - I hate stock photography!”  Over the years we have moved away from stock photos – we’re not saying they’re bad in all cases – but the idea of showing a happy smiling man in a business suit next to your new credit card offer not only seems banal to us, it also feels fake.

No real human being gets excited about mundane stuff  – we’re big fans of the Kotex tampon ads – in a world of overhyped bullshit and  exaggerated product marketing, the minute someone tells it how it is – we’re hooked.

Instead of using photos that had no relationship with Lauren Associates we designed a set of icons that represented each area of work and actually felt like they were part of the site.

Websites are not dead

If your website hasn’t changed in the last couple of years then you’re doing it wrong.  Lauren // Associates are adopting a content strategy so there is always going to be new content added but we’re not just talking about the blog.

The design of Lauren Associates is very clean, very simple and doesn’t have any photographic images (Cindy’s bio pic aside.)  Going forward we think a couple of great shots of Cindy working with clients would really accentuate the site and give the service area pages some additional color and relevance.  However, the shots have to be great and make sense within the overall design.

We prefer to develop long term relationships with our clients – we don’t just drop you when the site is launched.  New technologies arrive, standards are developed, things that could make your website perform better come on stream faster than ever before and we want you to benefit from them. 

There is no better marketing for Kilted Chaos than a successful client with a successful website – just checkout hip Los Angeles Realtor - Smilay Properties. 

Lauren // Associates is ready to go, we wish Cindy and her partners all the success in the world and we look forward to continually improving and developing the site as she grows.

Let us know what you think - considered input is always appreciated.  If you'd like to chat with us about your own site - then...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Transform and Roll Out!

While writing this post I couldn’t get the image of Megan Fox...err – scratch that – Optimus Prime out of my head.  The key word here is Optimize – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t about adding stuff that you don’t already have – it’s about making what you do have better.

In the same way that a gaudily colored truck can transform into a mobile battle station complete with Ion cannon – you too can transform your website into a highly ranking, customer catching cash funnel – all by following a few simple rules:

Take Care of the Tech

You’re not a website developer – you’re an attorney, a baker, a life coach, a marketer – whatever – it’s not your job to know how to set up your website correctly.  All you need to know is that there is a right way and a wrong way: HTML code should be structured correctly, page URLS should use real words and create hierarchies, H1 tags should be used, pages should have easily modified titles, descriptions, keywords and tags and content should be quickly distributed across different platforms and networks.

We recently ran across an agency that was going to charge a client $9,000 to ‘SEO” the very website that they themselves had built.  If I could have fallen off my chair I would – but I was already on the ground laughing over their definition of wireframes and site plans.  If you are having a new website built – all of this should be taken care of – if you’ve got questions – ask us – we’re always happy to give you an opinion.

Use the Right Words

You might refer to your business as an “Artisanal Horticultural Hideaway” – your customers however are typing the words “Flower Shop” into the search engines.  If you’re not already familiar with it – you must spend a little bit of time with Google’s Keyword Finder tool – it’s free, it’s easy and actually quite fascinating.

Write down all the words you think that describe your business – then go to the online tool and see how many people are searching for these terms.  Because the tool displays words that are used in similar searches you will often find that people use a different word for your business.  Find the most popular words that describe what it is you do and incorporate those words into your writing.

Use the Right Combination of Words

This is the whole “write like your customers speak” concept – often difficult for professions that use a lot of Jargon.  When you’re in the keyword finder you’ll see that Google shows not just single words but a series of phrases – these phrases are what people are typing into the search engine.

Studies have shown that people who arrive on your site from longer keyword phrases (3 to 5 with 4 being the optimum) convert better.  The thinking goes that the more detailed their search (i.e. the more words they use) the more serious they are about finding a solution – and if you can match their phrase then they will be more serious about you.

Get People to Link to Your Site

The more people that link to your site the better; get some heavyweight well established site to link to your content and your search rankings will increase dramatically.  But there’s only one way to ensure that people will link to you.

People don’t recommend crap to their friends – they recommend stuff that adds to their knowledge, that makes them laugh, that makes them feel good about passing it on.  There is absolutely no point in having some 3rd party firm writing generic content about your business – in the old days before everybody was a publisher this might have had merit - nowadays if you publish the same boring crap that everybody else is producing then people will learn to ignore you.

Transform and Roll Out

A new content strategy absolutely works if you are passionate about your business and can put that passion into words.  Read your content before you post – does it resonate, do you believe yourself, would you stand by the article in front of Megatron and fight for its authenticity?

As we’ve written before – times are changing and you need to change, adapt and transform to keep your business on top.  Fortunately this brave new world only wants to hear about why you love what it is you do and how you do it.  Forget the marketing speak, start writing, write from the heart, write with your customers words and phrasing, transform yourself and roll out!

Image Credit: Wikipedia

ABnote.eu

“We want to move towards a content marketing strategy and need to integrate our UK, French and Czech payment card and applications businesses into one .EU website with a design that is easily translatable into all three languages – would you be interested in pitching for the business?”

Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

This was our biggest project to date and we beat out a couple of European agencies to win the business.  We're in the process of translating the site into French and Czech and will be launching them under their own country top level domains in the next month.

The only thing the client gave us was the estalished pink ABnote logo and a confirmation that pink was actually a key color for them!  Working closely with the client side project manager we produced a loose mood board, site plan and ultimately a series of wireframes to arrive at a functional layout which we then turned into photoshop mock ups which were eventually approved by the clent technical executive.  Then it was a matter of installing WordPress and getting to work; in a nutshell:

• Custom icon set, driving the design feel of the entire site
• Heavily customised Thesis framework
• Frontpage Slidedeck
• Pop up contact forms
• Easily inserted call to action buttons for end user
• Client branded and customized WP login and dashboard

This is the fourth project we have delivered for the ABnote group in the last 6 months; after wining the project we also won pitches to provide an analysis of their global digital footprint, re-skin of a credit card customization and tracking portal as well as some nice graphic work that Alex knocked out of the park.

You can see more examples of Kilted Chaos work here.

Find out how we can help your business: