5 Ways to Win at Website Localization

A post from Robert Laing at Mashable on the topic of website localization.

In the screenshot above, notice how Zynga Japan, the company behind Farmville and Cityville, incorporates the Japanese flag into its homepage banner.

Let’s compare the English and Japanese websites of Rakuten, the company behind the largest online shopping mall in Japan.

Notice that the Rakuten USA website (above) is simple and clean when compared to the Rakuten Japan website (below). Of course, know that Japanese websites can oftentimes appear overly busy to the non-native eye.

With the help of the Internet, expanding into new markets continues to become easier than ever before.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tumpikuja

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5 Ways to Win at Website Localization

Sitefinity and Beyond

Version 4.0 of Sitefinity has been finally released in mid-January after a lengthy upgrade cycle that included a complete rewrite from the ground up, according to Telerik.

The new version features a new ASP.NET architecture with widgets based on ASP.NET controls, an enhanced interface and support for .NET Framework 4 and the revamped Windows Workflow. Earlier versions of .NET are not supported. More than 100 Telerik RADControls for Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX, and the OpenAccess ORM are included with the CMS.

Telerik acquired Mallsoft, an ecommerce technology company, and has plans to integrate an ecommerce module. The acquisition lays the groundwork for the integration of advanced e-commerce functionality and a robust system for handling online stores within the Sitefinity platform.

“This is the culmination of many years of real-world experience, extensive time and resources invested in product R&D, and in gathering customer feedback. Additionally, with new frameworks supporting Mallsoft’s e-commerce technologies, users have the ability to fully manage all aspects of their online business, from corporate websites to intranets to online stores. Sitefinity 4.0 has matured into one of the market’s most powerful, comprehensive, and highest quality content management solutions being shipped today,” said Martin Kirov, executive vice president of Sitefinity at Telerik. “By minimizing complexities while providing robust tools and innovative features addressing every aspect of the site building and management experience, Sitefinity 4.0 enables users to quickly, easily, and efficiently optimize their web presence.”

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More information:

• www.sitefinity.com
• www.telerik.com
• www.esitefinity.com

The Internet Running Out of IP Addresses

According to several measures by experts, the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), an ICANN-operated organization which administers the Internet's IP address infrastructure and root servers, has run out of IPv4 address blocks to assign to RIRs (Regional Internet Registries). We are close to that point, but the situation is more complicated than it may seem.

What happens then? The future is very uncertain. There's IPv6, but the roblem is that IPv6 isn’t backwards compatible with IPv4, which means that everybody will need to upgrade the software on their computers and networking equipment and, in some cases, buy completely new hardware, which is going to be very expensive, and in any case, it's difficult to imagine how all that can happen in just a few weeks.

However, although upfront costs of moving to the new protocol will be high, any further delays would push costs even higher. In June, Vint Cerf, appeared in an online video urging ISPs to do more to transition to IPv6.

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Read More:

• Has the Internet Run Out of IPv4 Addresses?
• The Internet running out of IP addresses