Internationalizing Your Web Site
By Nancy Hickman
Although some Web sites deal only with local customers, many Webmasters must be prepared to handle foreign information. In this article, I'll address several design issues that arise in conjunction with foreign customers. To illustrate, I'll construct a solution for a mythical client, JScripterman, an outfitter for virtual safaris; see
Figure 1.
Assuming that content translation is not an issue, the four major obstacles in international Web transactions are measurements, currency, addressing information, and non-standard characters. Happily, JavaScript is ideal for massaging the data entered for both display and submission.
Measurements
Selling products over the Web is basically a catalog business, and good catalogs provide product dimensions. Traditional catalog businesses, such as Land's End, provide a complete description of sizes on their Web sites-in both English and metric standards. Offering this option does not require that you submit the dimension differences to your backend database, and there are several ways to do it. Here, I'll use a popup window that writes out the appropriate measurements for the user; see
Figure 2.
