• You have to have something that really is of value, and the process of exploring that value with prospective clients should be one that benefits them (independently of your offering) by informing them about the subject matter you work with.
• The process should be one of mutual discovery, and throughout you should both be asking yourselves whether it makes sense to keep talking.  If not, you should disengage in a way that leaves the door open for future cooperation.

The availability of exciting new tools like Google Translate® has caused some people to wonder if there is still a requirement for professional human Web site translation.  The answer is probably best given by the Google Translate team in their Wikipedia post:

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations.

As this post suggests, Google Translate and other automated Web translation services are excellent at giving their users a general idea of what a Web pages is about, but they are not only not exact, they are sometimes downright inaccurate.  For example, Google Translate renders the menu text “Energy Taskforce” on one site into Spanish as “Energy of the Force of Work” (“Energía de la Fuerza de Tarea”), from which the real meaning if the link can’t even be guessed.  A good rule of thumb for Google Translate is that any page on which you would be comfortable posting content with spelling and grammatical errors is a good candidate for using only Google Translate without human translation.

Converting your Website to provide content in more than one language can be relatively simple, or it can be large project that represents a major investment for your organization.  The nature of the project depends on several factors:

What you want to accomplish by adding additional languages.  If are just entering a new market and want a Web presence to introduce yourself, your options and priorities are different than if you need to launch a fully functional e-commerce site to serve a large and demanding customer base.

The technology your current Website is built on.  If your site is based on a content management tool (like WordPress™ , Joomla™, or SiteCore™), your process and options will be different than if your site is static HTML or uses internally developed programming to display content. Internally developed solutions often assume date and number formats, currency symbols and screen text that are not appropriate for international audiences, while the menus and links in static HTML sites are not built to display multiple languages.

How frequently the site is updated and how many target languages you have.  For relatively static sites to be translated to one additional language, a different approach is appropriate than for frequently updated sites in several languages.  It is critical to plan for updates, since a Web site must be maintained and updated in order to be valuable.

Whether you plan to customize site content such as images, colors and icons to be culturally appropriate for each target language and locale.

The availability of Web designers and technical resources with multilingual Web site experience and language skills.  Some approaches to translating your site rely on substantial help from Web designers or IT folks and rely on them to correctly place translated text.

What are the options?

Depending on what you hope to achieve from your translation project, there are usually several options for translating your site ranging from relatively low-cost, entry-level strategies to more robust, fully globalized approaches.  In general though, at each level there are better and worse choices.  The table below summarizes some of these options:

• The staff of the agency or organization would often prefer to speak with clients and potential clients who access the site in order to accurate access their needs and be sure that they are pointed in the right direction.
• Wise non-profits and government agencies sometimes do not object to providing an online form but they also want to provide a phone number, email address and mailing address in order to allow site visitors to contact the organization in the way that is most convenient to the visitor.

1. Getting visitors to the site, and
2. Converting visitors to buyers (at a profitable price).

It’s true that some online retailers focus on these fundamentals better than others, but the built in feedback mechanism of the marketplace tends to correct this --- good, usable sites get traffic, make sales, and stay in business while bad sites don’t.  

For organizations where the feedback mechanism is not as direct, it is a lot harder to identify online conversions that support the key goals of the organization.  I’ve been in a lot of meetings, particularly with non-profits and government agencies, where our clients have been frustrated by our attempts to reduce their project (which until the meeting have been thought of in very lofty, conceptual terms) to the fundamentals of:

1. A clear, concise statement of the strategic goals of the organization, and
2. A list of concrete things they want visitors to the organization’s site to do and how those actions support strategic goals.

These folks often object that their site is informational and that there is not really an online conversion related to what they are trying to accomplish.  In other words, non-profits and government agencies are often primarily trying to inform, educate and advocate, not sell something.  How are they supposed to measure and track changes in the perceptions of visitors to the site?  How can they tell when someone has become more informed or educated?  

These are tough and legitimate questions.  It is often more comfortable for agencies and organizations to simply build a site delivers a snappy new look and feel and some cool new online do-dads rather than devote time and energy to soul-searching about the mission of the organization and how to track the Web site’s impact on that mission.  But what is most comfortable and what is best for the organization are not necessarily the same. In order to do what’s best for the organization, these questions must be part of the planning process.  The reality is that there are a variety of mechanisms (surveys, offline referral source tracking, creative use of contact forms) to measure the impact of a Web site, but implementing them sometimes requires a new level of discipline and adoption of new tools not only through the Web site but in the organization’s offline activities as well.  The next post in this series will examine some of these tools.

Matt Cutts' blog recently had a post about how to reduce the volume of junk postal (snail) mail that you receive , which seemed like a cool thing for someone with a readership as large as his to post about.  Of course, the real answer to junk mail is to change postal rates so that it is not economical to annoy people and damage the environment with junk mail (and perhaps this kind of change would also have the benefit of forcing some of the companies that currently rely on interruption marketing rather than innovation to step up their game).  In the meantime, though, anything that we as individuals can do is important because, aside from the annoyance, the environmental cost of  junk mail  is quite high.

Matt's suggestions got me thinking about steps iData can take to be greener, and one obvious step came to mind, namely to research and advocate green Web hosting companies.  People often don't think much about the power required to run Web servers (and more importantly to power the air conditioning units that data centers run), but it is significant.  Since most greenhouse gas emissions are from power plants, reducing energy consumption in any way we can is really important.  So, over the next several months, we'll be looking into Green Web hosting, and we'll let you know what we find.  In the meantime, here are some resources:

• An article on treehugger.com about green hosting options.
• Another treehugger article about wind and solar powered hosts .
• Host Papa carbon neutral Web hosting
• Greenest Host solar powered hosting.
• Aiso.net solar powered hosting.

By the way, thinking about green Web hosting got me thinking about whether people really care about the environmental impact of the choices they make in their daily lives, which gave me an excuse to use Google Trends to do a little research about what people are searching for.  If you haven't played with Google Trends, you should.  It is a service that lets you see among other things the relative frequency of different search terms (i.e. Yankees versus Red Sox).  The most interesting result I saw in comparing various environment-related terms was the relative frequency of searches for "electric car" versus "cheap gas" (see the screenshot below).  It seems we hear from the media all the time how ordinary people are not concerned about conservation, they just want cheap gas so we should focus on more drilling (even though drilling to solve our current energy problems is, according to the US Energy Information Administration,  not a realistic option ).  



But guess what --- people search more frequently for information about electric cars (red line) than they do for cheap gas (blue line), which suggests to me that maybe your average Web surfer is a lot smarter than many in the media and in politics, who often suggest short sighted and unrealistic solutions when what people want is real, thoughtful leadership.  This impression is further borne out by the lower graph, displaying the volume of news stories about both terms. The conventional wisdom is that news stories drive search volume, but in this case you see that the reverse may be true  --- the most recent spike in the volume of stories about electric cars has come after a sustained rise in the number searches, suggesting that the media is belatedly catching on to people's interest in electric cars.

This post will explore one way that we use Google’s Webmaster Tools to optimize our site. In case you're not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, they are found in the Webmasters area of the Google site ( here ), and you can get a quick introduction from our article about the predecessor application, called Google Webmaster Console.

One of the most useful areas of Webmaster Tools is the overview screen. The overview provides a summary of any issues that Google sees with your site.

For example, let’s say that you decide (like iData recently did) to update your site and re-organize the content, but you don’t want to lose search engine rank accumulated by the old pages/URLs. As those who’ve been through the process know, in this situation you want to use 301 redirects to let search engines and site visitors know about the change. For our update, we implemented 301 redirects for almost all of our old site pages (we thought) using the URL redirect functionality built into our Synapse Publisher CMS.

Soon after the move, when we looked at the overview, we started seeing pages from the old site showing up as not found. Clicking the not found error brings up the Web Crawl report with details of the URLs. This report is great, because it gave us a handy list of pages we’d missed creating URLs for.

To fix these pages, I logged into Synapse, went to the URL Redirects screen and added the missing links.

I then went back to the Web Crawl report and clicked the missing URLs in order to make sure that they were fixed. Clicking the links now brings up the redirected page of new content, which is exactly what we want.

Content is the currency used to acquire audience. Companies can print their own. Most don’t.