Member Avatar for Rosette

Hello,

My name is Rosette and I am new to te DaniWed community. I have been navigating and searching the forums to familiarize myself with this community and I am impressed and intrigued by the variety of topics I am exposed to.

I am on the advertising team of a fairly new publication, and because we are tight on finances, we cannot afford real professional web designers to create our web site. Our company web site is viewed by people all over the world and I would like to make sure that it is suitable for such a diverse audience.

I know that colors, pictures, designs, and so on all mean different things to different people of various backgrounds. Are there any rules or guidelines one should use when desiging a web site that is targeting a diverse global community?

We hired a group of people that designed our web site for us, but its nice to hear the opinions from different perspectives to better reach out to others. Your assistance would be deeply appreciated.

I look forward to hearing any advice that comes my way.

Sincerely,
Rossetta

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Dani AI

Generated

— targeting a worldwide audience works best when the site is built to be adapted, not rebuilt. With a small budget, invest in repeatable foundations: keep copy and UI separate, define a short localization guide, and pick fonts and components that cover many scripts so adding a new market is cheap and fast.

Concrete, low-effort technical basics to apply once:

  • Declare UTF-8 and the page language, and mark direction for RTL locales.
  • Keep text out of images and use scalable icons so translations and swaps don’t require new art.
  • Design flexible layouts that tolerate longer labels and different line breaks.

Example skeleton (minimal):

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
  <title>Site</title>
</head>
<body>
  <!-- content pulled from locale files -->
</body>
</html>

Create a tiny localization checklist for reviewers: tone, core terms, imagery rules, date/number/currency formats, and field formats for addresses/phones. Use a translation memory or a small glossary to keep language consistent. Prefer human review for key pages; machine-only translations often miss tone or cause usability errors.

Keep testing cheap and practical: recruit one or two native reviewers per target market for short sessions, track behavior by locale in analytics, and iterate. Follow accessibility and internationalization standards when possible. Useful references: W3C Internationalization, WCAG, and Unicode CLDR. As hinted about language concerns, quick local reviews will catch most surprises before they reach users.

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Member Avatar for DaveSW

If you're looking at less developed countries, you'll need to ensure fast download times.
Also look at cross-browser compatibility - some people may use macs etc.
You need a standard layout so that people know where to find things, and you need to make your navigation system clear so people who perhaps aren't too familiar with english can still find what they want.

Are we supposed to be commenting generally or on the link in your profile?

Member Avatar for Rosette

We are reaching out to all countries, cultures, social status, educational levels, professions and so on.

I thank you for your suggestions and will keep them in mind.

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