MULTILINGUAL

WEBSITES One business. Several languages. One coherent site.

Adding a switch is the visible part. What makes a site genuinely multilingual is everything the visitor doesn’t see: a separate, readable URL for each language, translated navigation and page titles, copy that sounds like the business in each language, and layouts that still work when a Dutch or Spanish sentence runs longer than the English one.

It also tells search engines which version is for whom, so the right page appears for the right searcher. Get that wrong and visitors land on the wrong language — or on none of the versions at all.

This is easiest when languages are planned from the first sketch, which is why it is part of how we approach any custom website. If your site already has several languages and the structure is the problem, that is a job for a website redesign.

We don’t claim automatic translation is good enough for the pages that sell. DABA works in English, Spanish and Dutch, and for important commercial copy a review by a native speaker is often a sensible step.

So we build the site so that copy can be reviewed and updated language by language, without touching the design. If a language needs a different order of information, not only different words, the structure allows it.

For businesses serving residents and visitors from several countries, this is often where a site stops feeling like a brochure and starts feeling local. See how that plays out on the Costa Blanca.