SPANISH WEBSITE DESIGN - BILINGUAL WEBSITE DEVELOPERS

An excerpt from: A Gringo's Guide to Online Hispanic Marketing

By Brian Krogstad & Miles Houck

Spanish Website Design

The first step to doing business online with Generation Equis is developing a Spanish website or a Spanish landing page. Although a lot of members of Generation Equis speak and read English, they generally appreciate, and in some case prefer, a Spanish website. A Spanish website will also allow you to reach the truly untapped piece of Generation Equis; the Spanish speaking Hispanics in America.

Whether the Spanish website complements an existing English website or will be your only online presence, the differences between a traditional English website and a Spanish website is similar to the difference between apples and oranges. The most important thing to remember from the beginning of the project is to start from scratch!

Your new website is a great way to reach out to current and new customers. you will find that they will do more business with you when they firmly understand your offerings and will be more likely to continue doing business with you as their loyalty increases in response to your efforts.

The key strategies to consider when developing a Spanish website for Generation Equis are:

• Starting From Scratch: A successful Spanish website needs to be a standalone site that may or may not be integrated into an existing English website with links. Simply translating the text of an English site into Spanish is not always the best option when reaching out to Generation Equis online.

• The Planning Phase: The most important phase of launching a Spanish website is the planning phase. You must define clear and achievable goals as well as work with a fully bilingual developer that understands the language and culture of Generation Equis as well as the ins and outs of dealing with your company’s management.

• Look & Feel: The structure, style, color and images of your site need to appeal to the commonalities and cultural similarities of Generation Equis without isolating, insulting or offending members of the demographic.

• Content is Key: Website content is a key factor in launching a successful Spanish website. Whether you organize focus groups, perform market research or just look at what content is used by the high page rank Spanish sites for ideas - the same goals should be kept in mind. First make sure the content you select fits your business model and be careful to only use content that is attractive to Generation Equis and will prompt them to remember your brand, follow your call to action and return to your site.

• Your Product and Services Offering: Depending on the nature of your business, Generation Equis may be a new untapped market for you or it may be an existing market where you would like to provide better service or increase your market penetration. Regardless of your situation it is imperative that you analyze your mainstream offerings and determine which offers you would like to present to this market online as well as look for incremental opportunities specific to Generation Equis.

Now let’s go into more detail about each of these topics.

Starting From Scratch

A lot of companies make the mistake of trying to translate their English website to Spanish without understanding the cultural differences and content requirements of a Spanish site or the pieces that are lost in translation. Needless to say, most companies start off by trying to translate the text of an English site to Spanish and at the end of the day end up scrapping the project and starting from scratch anyways losing the time and money invested in the initial project.

A website is never completed. It needs to be continuously updated to meet your goals. But to design a good website you must have clear and concise goals and a launch point, or BETA release, before you start development.

The Planning Phase

After setting the goals of your site, the next step is selecting a website developer. Forward thinking companies will use a bilingual developer and depending on the size of your company maybe even a bilingual project or program manager as well. It is important to have someone driving the project that understands the languages and cultures represented by Generation Equis as well as maintain the ability to effectively communicate this information with the English speaking representatives of your company. Have you ever called for technical support and talked with an outsourced technician with a thick accent and poor to fair English skills? It can be hard enough to understand the technical jargon without having to deal with a language barrier as well.

If you have an in-house IT or design department staffed with a superstar bilingual employee you may have the right person for the job. Consider yourself very lucky. Chances are however that this project will be more successful and cost effective if it is outsourced to a bilingual web developer that understands the market.The web developer needs to consider what you want your website to look like and how it will be organized. A well planned and structured site with simple navigation will help your visitors find what they need right away.

Competitive Intelligence is an effective tool in designing your site. Research what your competitors are doing and see how many of them have a Spanish website. Be sure to note, bookmark, or add to favorites, the sites that you find. It is important to see what you are up against as well as use what they have learned to your advantage. Chances are that your customers have grown accustomed to the structure and navigation of your competitors’ Spanish websites. In essence, you keep the things that work and scrap the things that do not. After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can just make it rounder.

Look & Feel

The style, images and colors of your website should be selected with one goal in mind; getting your visitors to take action or remember your brand. Generation Equis, like mainstream consumers, remembers things that are easy to understand, appeal to their senses and have a sense of familiarity. In addition to researching and making conscious decisions to buy or respond to a call to action, they also react to impulse and emotion and can be easily persuaded when their comfort level is high and they trust the source.

The look and feel of your site needs to be something that your visitors can relate to. The Spanish text is a great start but truly successful Generation Equis marketing requires a website with the style, colors and images that appeal to the demographic. This is accomplished by appealing to the commonalities that they share not by over stressing stereotypes or isolating one part of the demographic to focus on another.

For example, using an image of a Hispanic male or female on your site would be considered culturally acceptable by most of the members of Generation Equis but using images of the Mexican flag throughout your site would not only isolate consumers from Spanish speaking countries other than Mexico but it may even be negatively perceived by first and second generation Spanish speakers in the United States that identify themselves as Americans not Mexicans. If that makes sense to you, reflect for a minute on how many Fortune 500 company websites that you have seen with a Spanish version of their website that is solely accessible and marketed to consumers by offering a little Mexican flag symbol at the top of their website linked to the Spanish version of their site. How do you think someone originally from Argentina, Columbia or Spain would feel about that?

Also consider how many of the thousands of English websites for companies in the United States that you have visited that have a red, white and blue color scheme with American flags all over them. Not many I’m sure. The goal is to have your site appeal to Generation Equis with subtle style, image and color variations that they can identify with without offending anyone or presenting a less than professional website appearance.

Content is Key

Once you have the structure, navigation, style, images and colors of your site planned out, it is time to think about content. The competitive intelligence that you have collected is a great place to start. Depending on your business model and nature of your business, you may want to go back to the competitive intelligence that you collected on your competitors and see what kind of content they are using. If budget allows, you may want to consider focus groups or market research studies of current and potential customers that fall into the Generation Equis demographic. Find out what they need, what they would like and what they would love to have incorporated into your Spanish website.

Your Product and Services Offering

In addition to identifying the content you will be placing on your website, you also need to analyze your products or services and confirm that Generation Equis will be attracted to the same offering that you present to mainstream consumers. It is just as important to look for opportunities to modify your existing offerings to include products or services attractive to Generation Equis consumers and drive incremental sales from this untapped market. Once you have a website development plan together you need to revisit the goals of your site and make sure that your plan is a roadmap to a site that will facilitate the achievement of your goals.

Whether you are looking to use your site to brand your company to Generation Equis, sell a product or service or even create a call to action for your traditional marketing channels, you need to confirm that your plan is all encompassing and includes the necessary tools and functions.

DON'T WASTE TIME & MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY!

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