Choose your language 
Multilingual sites often use the language they think most of their users will understand (http://www.fortis.nl) or the language that they assume is most likely to be their mother tongue (http://www.kbc.be) as the standard language in which the site appears. Other sites base themselves on the visitor's IP-number to venture a guess as to what could be the user's language (http://www.google.com). This is all good and well as long as you guess correctly, but it irritates users when you get it wrong. Our advice is not to guess and just give users the opportunity to select the language of their choice when they first visit your site.

A first page which only purpose is to let a user select a language should do this in a simple, efficient way. For this reason, it should contain your company logo (so as to inform the user he is indeed on the right site) and one language selection. To avoid confusion, it is best to state the name of each language as a word, using each language's own name for itself, like for example on http://www.dvv.be or http://www.stedelijk.nl. Anything on this page that is not logo or language choice is unnecessary baggage that only confuses the user and diminishes the efficiency of the page.

Changing languages during a visit
Because a lot of users don't enter a site through the homepage but often go directly to pages via search services, it is vital that you provide language choice on every page of the site. A user who stumbles onto a page in a language that is foreign to him, will abandon this page if he doesn't immediately sees that this page is also available in a language he does master. Make sure you offer language choice on every page of your site and always place it in the same, clearly visible spot.

It is also very important that you direct the user to the exact page of his choice in the language of his choice, like Cinebel does, and not send him back to the homepage, like AdValvas does.

Remember the user's language choice 
If you offer the user a choice, you should also make an effort to remember the language choice. That way when a user returns to your site you can immediately address him in his language of choice, not to mention the fact that you save him the trouble of an extra click. Make sure you remember the choice the user made last, like they do at www.immoweb.be and not the user's first choice, like they do at www.electrabel.be.

Els Aerts & Karl Gilis

A more in depth version of this article has appeared in Tips & Advies Online Ondernemen, year 5, number 13 (Belgium and the Netherlands).