[IxDA Discuss] RE : country views on global sites

[Peter Bagnall]

How are you detecting the country? One approach is to use the IP  
address, another approach is to look at the accept-language HTTP  
header, which will give you a language, and often a country. the UK  
shows up as en-GB, the USA as en-US for example.

So if you use the accept language header (it may be called something  
different, I'm offline as I write this) you can often get the country  
right as well as the language in those countries that have more than  
one.

Of course, you may already be doing this and finding that not  
everyone tells their browser where they are or what language they  
speak! I'd love to know if that's the case, since I intend to be  
using this approach on a site myself soon, as yet I've not tried this  
myself, it's pure theory!

Of course it'll never be perfect, but it may get you another few  
percent happy users.

Cheers
--Pete

On 2 Aug 2006, at 16:18, John Grøtting wrote:

> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted  
> material.]
>
> I have seen a few approaches that can work for this.
>
> Entry page
> An entry page can help you capture language and country information
> and store that in a cookie. This is good when you aren't able to
> determine the country or language of the user. Since it only appears
> on the first visit (if they have cookies turned on), it is a minor
> annoyance. This is particularly useful for companies where their
> customers may not be able to read any English at all and may even
> have a non-roman character set.
>
> Localized homepage
> Quite often you can detect the country of origin. This will help you
> restrict the site to the local languages (official and unofficial).
> You will then need to determine if you want all content on the
> homepage to be in multiple languages. If you do, often it is helpful
> to have one language be English, in case the visitor is coming from a
> country such as Japan, but has French as their native language. In
> this situation, it is important that any English usage be geared
> towards non-native English speakers. This means removing jargon and
> using sentence structure that is simple. Here you will need to have a
> visible option for the user to change the language of choice.
>
> Either way you will be confronted with how to deal with local content
> in the local languages and in one or more additional languages that
> are in common usage by your audience.
>
> What is the content of the website? Who is the audience?
>
> John Grøtting
>
> Grøtting + Sauter
> Barnerstr. 14B
> 22765 Hamburg
> Germany
>
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>
> Am 02.08.2006 um 17:01 schrieb Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt:
>
>> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted
>> material.]
>>
>> Just make sure that any user can escape easily from that preset
>> experience.  Most countries do not have a single common language (the
>> US and the UK are exceptions) or neat marketing arrangements for all
>> goods, despite the united or monobloc facades their governments
>> like to
>> present to the world.  Making it possible and relatively easy to get
>> info in another language on another country site is a must.
>>
>> Alain Vaillancourt
>>
>>> It has been requested by the client that whenever we can detect the
>>> country
>>> from which the user is comingl, we should "preset" the experience to
>>> reflect
>>> that country (local language, offerings, contact info, etc.).
>>
>>> Has anyone had experience with this type of arrangement? Is there  
>>> any
>>> overriding argument for or against this?
>>>
>> 		
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