This tutorial shows different ways for building and running multilingual websites. We’ll try to help you choose the best solution for your site, based on what it needs to do.
There are dozens of great ways for building websites, including many content management systems, online tools and desktop programs. We’ve chosen to talk about a few of them, who we’re familiar with and can support multilingual contents.
| Platform | Tech-level | Flexibility | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Intermediate | Medium | Good for small to large sites that include mainly pages and posts. |
| Drupal | Advanced | High | Good for corporate sites. Requires a professional developer to build and maintain. |
| Custom built | Expert | Maximal | Good in case the functionality cannot fit in a content management system. |
| Template based | Low | Limited | Allows getting started quickly, but makes it difficult to maintain and grow. |
WordPress – a lightweight CMS, great for managing pages and posts
WordPress summary
Sample site
A Dutch Master Florist offering International floristry trainings and workshops.
Advantages
- Easy to set up and use.
- Large selection of themes and plugins and custom functionality.
- Many designers – means you can order a professional custom theme for a low cost.
Recommended for
- Product or service sites
- Budget sensitive projects
If your site includes mostly static contents (pages) and blog posts then WordPress might be the ideal solution for building it.
- Easy to use content editor
- WordPress includes a great editor that lets edit pages visually, without having to ever see the HTML (although, it still allow editing HTML directly). It creates pages and organizes them hierarchically.
- Blog posts
- Of course, being mostly a blogging platform, WordPress will allow creating a blog as part of the site.
- Images and videos
- WordPress’ media management is excellent. It allows uploading and quick-editing images. Easy-to-use plugins allow managing YouTube videos and Flickr galleries.
- Multilingual support
- WordPress doesn’t come with built in support for multiple languages and site-navigation. The WPML plugin adds these functions and allows building full multilingual websites with WordPress.
Overall, WordPress is a pretty easy choice for any website that doesn’t include a massive amount of programming. Unless you’re doing a Digg clone, you should consider WordPress. It’s possible that your custom functionality is already implemented in a plugin.
Getting started with WordPress
- Download from wordpress.org.
- Get a free theme and start building contents.
- Hire a designer to create your own custom theme.
Drupal – CMS and application framework
Drupal summary
Sample site
Twitter power management
Advantages
- Flexible – you can achieve anything.
- Allows running an entire web application.
Recommended for
- Sites that need more than pages and posts
- Web application driven sites
Sites that have a mix of static contents and a web application can be built using Drupal. On these sites, Drupal runs as a web application. It also manages contents (CMS), but does far more than this.
For example, gotwiter.com, interacts with Twitter’s API, gets and sends twits and creates its own unique functionality. Sure, there are Twitter-update plugins for WordPress, but this goes to a different level.
- Flexible content types
- Drupal allows creating custom content types and display them in any way you need.
- Everything is configurable
- When the default way of doing thing isn’t right for you, you can always customize and change anything.
- Requires a pro
- With great power comes responsibility. To create a site with Drupal, you’ll need an expert Drupal designer.
Getting started with Drupal
- Create a detailed spec of what you need.
- Find an expert Drupal developer.
- Let the developer handle all technical aspects of the work, including your serve maintenance.
Custom PHP / ASP
Custom coded sites summary
Sample site
Weather forcast site
Advantages
- Fully flexible.
- Allows running an entire web application.
Recommended for
- Web application driven sites
- Sites with little static content
You might think that with such powerful content management systems, there’s no need for custom coded sites, but that’s not the case. For some sites, organizing contents in pages makes no sense.
For example, windguru.com generates all its contents from one central database – the world’s weather map. It makes no sense to artificially impose a page-by-page structure for this kind of site.
When building custom sites, it’s important to make them multilingual-ready from the start. Designers can use tools such as Gettext to make all the site’s contents translatable.
However, it’s generally pretty difficult to manage large texts in custom built sites. What people often do is use custom code for the application-generated parts of the site and a content management system for its static contents and blog.
For example, our own site (icanlocalize.com) uses Ruby-on-Rails as the application engine, powering our translation service and WordPress to drive the static contents.
- Complete flexibility
- You can achieve anything you like, without any constraints.
- Complex and expensive
- When you build your own system, you’re doing everything from scratch, so you should expect to pay more and spend more time.
HTML template sites
Template sites summary
Sample site
Shareware website
Advantages
- Low cost.
- Easy to get started.
- Minimal background needed
Recommended for
- Very small sites with few pages
- Folks looking to learn HTML
When the web started, almost everyone created their sites using static HTML files. Then, templates directories appeared, offering great starting points for HTML and CSS.
It’s still possible to build a site by directly editing its HTML, but most of the reasons for doing it have long diminished. However, the drawbacks of editing HTML files remain. When building a site from HTML files, everything needs to be done manually. This includes building site-wide navigation, maintaining translations, creating sitemaps, etc.
Updates can become most difficult as a change in one place often leads to many changes in many files.
- Easy to get started
- Just grab a free template and start editing.
- Low cost
- Since only basic skills are needed, an expert developer is usually not required to build template-based sites.
- Good for tiny static sites
- As long as the site includes just a few pages, it’s easier to write the HTML code than install a system that would do it.
Getting started with a template based website
- Grab a template.
- Edit the HTML.
- Upload to the server.
Hello Amir,
The PlazaSur.net website – mi online office – could be an intermediate case between the simple HTML site and a PHP/ASP site: it includes javascript.
The contents are placed in a javascript file and organized in a multilingual array… a single page shows/hides/switches all from a navigator using indexes, etc.
It works without server app – no user/password features are possible, for instance.
Thanks for this useful blog!
Alejandro
This would work, but would certainly confuse search engines.
All the text appears for all languages and the browser chooses what to display (via JS). When Google crawls your site, it sees different version of the same text. I’m pretty sure it causes search engine problems.
If you do this on the server, then the client (or Googlebot) only get the correct version, per language.
What about Joomla!? Can that not be consideres something in between WordPress and Drupal?
Joomla is certainly a great option for building sites. So is Typo3, Expression Engine and other fine content management systems.
I wrote about the ones we have in-depth experience with and where we know the solution for running multilingual.
Since writing this piece, have you any experience with Adobe Business Catalyst? It’s looking more and more like a good option for building and operating bilingual or multilingual sites, though we haven’t used it yet. Being in Canada, the bilingual card is significant for many of our clients.
Not really. I’m not familiar with Adobe Business Catalyst. But WordPress and WPML are very popular in Canada. Did you know that the Bank of Canada website runs on that?
Thanks for the quick response; I had no idea that the Bank of Canada uses WordPress. We are planning on using Adobe BC as it offers so much out of the box functionality (eCommerce, blogging platform/news, email marketing, CRM features, etc.) and can also be customized to a very high degree for our clients who don’t for one reason or another want a from-scratch website. The multilingual feature makes it even more attractive, so we’re inclined to go that route rather than WordPress. It’s the overhead thing – very few clients can take on the cost of ownership that the BoC can.