Global Market Place

At present, Americans represent the majority of web publishers and web surfers.  This is expected to change in the future, as more Europeans, Asians and others get online.

For the builder of commercial websites, it is vital to think globally. Always remember that your visitors might not be proficient with the English language. They also might not share your culture or values. What can you offer them?  How can you differentiate your site from those of your competitors?

There are a many web tools available to translate web pages from one language to another.  Although the translations are not elegant, they do provide a good "first cut" translation that can be cleaned up by someone who is proficient with the language.  If you publish a few key web pages in foreign languages, they will be indexed by search engines using the foreign language terms. This will bring you additional traffic.

One alternative to creating foreign language pages is to provide links to software that translate pages dynamically from one language to another.