For those of you who have been following this blog, you know that we are nearly done with RightSite.Asia, the region’s first bilingual website for industrial property.  After months of relentless site building, we are getting ready to wrap things up.
Except for one small problem.
This business of making things bilingual is more complicated than we realised. We are using a popular CMS (Content Management System) named Drupal to develop our site, and Drupal has a ready-made module called i18N that provides a structure for building a multi-lingual site. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
The challenge that we are facing is related to the way that the i18N internationalisatin module works. The module provides a framework for translating site content and displaying the content in separate but parallel versions of the site — one for each language. However, for our site we only need to translate part of the site — our listings of industrial facilities, industrial zones and other information are all structured in such a way that translation is not necessary. And we have no interest in maintaining a parallel set of listings for each language that we present the site in. (We hope to someday add traditional Chinese versions of the site, as well as Japanese and Vietnamese versions). However, we need the translation features of i18n for all other sections of the site.
Unfortunately, building a site that presents different types of content from different workflows in the same page is a bit challenging. And my development team decided that it would be much easier for them to just run the entire site through the i18N module. “Sure, that makes a bit more work for the customer service team as they have to manually translate a few hundred listings a day, but what that’s their job, right?”
See what happens when teams don’t communicate?
So now the big bad boss — that’s me has had to give the development team the sad news that their plan (and the current product) is not acceptable. The team now needs to revise our theme so that it can present listing information that is not processed through the i18N translation module, together with the content that has been processed through i18N, in the right language in both the English and Chinese versions of the site.
Hopefully this won’t cause any significant delays to the site, but it certainly won’t be easy. Then again, given the current economic outlook in China (and around the world), there is not much reason to hurry.
In any case, I need to get back to learning a bit more about web design and development, otherwise I won’t know what not to accept.
Hope you’re having a happy week!
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3 Responses to Web Development in an International World
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It could be seen that thoughts are put in to making this list more complete and in detail.
Maybe some other info could also be contained, like width and length max of the main space,
range of distance between columns
(could be crucial to many industries, massive machines).
Lighting—natural light to let in?
Accessibility: railway? highway? water?
Years already in use?
Elevator?
And–power.
And actually, the feature that attach a google or baidu map automatically(well, possibility, not sure) would be helpful to show the location, accessibility, thus gives overseas client possibility to do more research on their own e.g. locating it on google earth..
Maybe as a B2B website these details might not be necessary, coz both parties could communicate to get all info above. However, as a matter of the fact that industrial areas are limited, overseas companies cannot choose wherever their ideal location is, they are actually following the supply and choosing among these various places, info of which is beyond their research and knowledge(otherwise they themselves might already have a database likewise the rightsite)—-so direct details shown on website itself will save lots of exhausting telephone calls and research among an alienated language..
Maybe it is a good idea to give different levels of membership…the more “silver” or “golden” you are, the more detailed info you get.
Hi Z,
Thanks for your comments.
There are certainly a lot more variables that we could include for each property description, but at the same time, we have to balance that with promoting simplicity in our forms and presenting a user-friendly UI.
The column-spacing in particular was a last minute cut from the list.
We anticipate that, in the future, as users get more accustomed to our system, and RightSite becomes more attractive as a marketplace, that we will be able to add more detail without scaring away first time users.
I guess we will find out more once more users become active and we start getting feedback directly from the users of industrial property.