SITES THAT PLAY HARD TO GET

Navigation can make or break a web site, particularly when you are trying to help users who don’t speak English find their localized web pages. Many companies simply don’t plan ahead when building localized sites and then find themselves inserting a link to the localized sites at or near the bottom of the English site. This link, often called a global gateway or language gateway, is a critical component of generating traffic to your localized sites.

See if you can find the global gateway on the General Electric home page, shown in Figure 3.6. It’s not easy to find if you don’t speak English. Even if you do find it, a pull-down menu is not the ideal gateway, as the languages and countries are hidden from plain ...

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