So, I’ve been busy. Good and bad: Good because I’m gainfully employed in these tough times; bad because I haven’t blogged in… YIKES… close to five months! Well this particular post could have fit into a Tweet most likely.
In my last post, I listed some suggestions regarding multilingual website management. Well, I have a new task at hand regarding our local websites that I am about dive into. I will most definitely update this thread of posts on how this works out. I’ve been tasked by our VP of Marketing for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) to put in place a mechanism that will recognize when a user comes to the US English homepage of our website but is browsing from a location where we have a localized website that would be relevant to them. The idea is to present the visitor with an interstitial window that will explain to them in their language that they may want to visit the local language version for a better user experience and perhaps information that is most relevant to them regarding regional events, contact information, etc. The user would have the ability to save the preference of always being directed to their “local” site on subsequent visits, or simply choose “no thanks”. (okay, at this point, maybe I couldn’t have done this in a Tweet 
).
So, this is my most recent “international” task. In my research thus far, I’ve come across some various methods of doing this. A lot of the solutions I found are built around Apache environments of for folks using Drupal. I however am using an enterprise content management system on IIS. I have some ideas on how to implement it, but the proof will be in the pudding.
In the mean time, I thought I’d pass this along this tip as well: Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have an account and yet and you have anything to do with managing a website, drop what you’re doing and familiarize yourself with it. The reason that I am mentioning it here is because via your account, you can tell Google that you have content on your website, in say France for example, that is more relevant to viewers in France. So, let’s say that your company develops widgets and has a section all localized in French. You can tell Google that www.yourcompany.com/fr/widgets is more relevant to viewers in Paris than www.yourcompany.com/en/widgets. Pretty neat stuff.
I’ll update again once I’ve successfully implemented this.
