Updates:

• Overall code base simplified and cleaned up, unused functions removed
• Support for PHP PDO
• Now uses a simple SQLite database with a single table for the base application
• Now uses a smarter, more effective PHP router class (thanks to Dan Sosedoff)
• All of the code is now thoroughly commented
• You no longer have to specify the base directory, it is automatically directed
• Fixed bug related to page redirections
• Fixed bug that caused buttons to show up improperly
• Fixed bug that prevented ‘Back’ button from appearing

Of course, there is always room for improvement so any and all feedback is appreciated. There are certainly a few bad programming practices, so if more experienced coders could help point them out I will gladly fix them up!

The word globalization has become a major buzzword in the business world. Nowadays, businesses realize the important role that the internet plays and as a result have tapped into it to reach new and emerging markets on a global scale.

Of course, planning and designing a business website aimed at a global market is simply more than translating your website into a chosen foreign language. E-marketers will understand that cultural differences will play a substantial role when it comes to your relationship with prospective visitors and clients.

This means time and effort should be taken when it comes to your website for cross-culture success. There is a lot more than first meets the eye, but as overwhelming as it may seem, there are ways in which you can create a successful website for a foreign market.

Consider these five tips on how to effectively produce a website that meets international demands for your business.

1. Know who your audience is

Before jumping into the design process of your website you should undertake the required market research first. This will help you to establish which country you should target first and which country will benefit the most from what you can offer them.

The worst thing you can do is skip this part only to realize after launching your website that you have to contend with local competition. Once you have determined the best route you can then move on to creating your site.

Something to consider during the design process is whether or not your context should be high or low. According to cultural theorist Edward Hall, High Context cultures, for instance Asian cultures, take meaning from the context presented, whereas Low Context cultures, for example those in Northern Europe, derive meaning purely from the content.

This means that a website aimed at LC should be straightforward and succinct and one aimed at HC should be complete with imagery, video and interactivity.

2. Loyalty with individuality

A survey by Experian in 2010 found that 83% of respondents want companies to understand their needs. In today’s society, everyone wants to be treated as an individual and websites are no different from this. When it comes to translated websites, you may find that they are missing an integral part, which is often where native speakers can play a fundamental role in getting your message across.

To attract a loyal base of customers you can also make sure that you employ top level country code domains, for example www.example.cz (Czech Republic). Not only will this increase your search engine rankings, but it will boost your credibility with the locals, which is essentially what you want.

3. User friendly

When it comes to tailoring your website, you will find that making your website as simple as possible in terms of navigation and layout will make a big difference. Choose a top-tab design along with horizontal navigation making usability user friendly and universal for languages that read left-to-right and right-to-left.

Another point to bear in mind is that you should make sure you have enough flexibility in your image and text boxes so that you can change these when required with ease. For example if you are targeting a German market you will find from your research that they require 30% more space, on average, to say the same thing that you would for your English market.

4. Picking the right colors

While choosing a color for your website may not seem like it needs much thought, it does. Colors, after all, can play a vital role in many cultures.

For instance, while Western cultures may consider red to mean either love or danger, in China the color red is used for celebration and good luck. Because of this, it’s best to pick a neutral color that doesn’t have any background connation. A worldwide color that works is blue.

5. Utilizing the best tools

If you have plans to design a number of sites and want to switch between languages without having to start the design process from the beginning then you should use Unicode. This is your one-stop-program that makes switching between characters easy.

With more than a hundred thousand characters and over 90 languages, you can transform your site from English to Chinese, to Arabic, to Hebrew, to Thai. The most frequent character encoding for this package is UTF-8, which is most used for websites and emails.

Another tool to utilize is CSS, or what is known as Cascading Style Sheets. This allows you to easily keep content and images separated and doesn’t require you to begin from the start when you need to alter the language of your site. Not only that, but because the files are small your pages will load faster. This is particularly useful to know when it comes to maintaining new and existing clients.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder of Lingo24, one of the world’s fastest growing translation agencies. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV, World Bank and American Express. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

1. Success is dependent on effort

This might seem pretty obvious but while I was in the valley, I noticed first-hand that the companies that put in the most amount of effort were the most successful. It’s essentially just like school – the people who work extremely hard are able to get good grades, even if they’re not the most intelligent in the class. There are, of course, outliers – companies that are just exceptionally bright from the get-go, though I think they’re far less common than smart students in school.

2. Everyone thinks they can be an entrepreneur

I remember at our launch party, I met a couple of people who told me they quit their jobs recently and were starting their own business. They were working in the valley and now they’re living the dream, starting a company of their own! While that’s all fine and dandy, in all reality the vast majority of startups fail, and truth be told, not many people have what it takes to succeed. A lot of the people I met lacked both technical skill and work ethic, which makes it all the more difficult to succeed as a tech startup.

3. Only work with people you really like

I was fortunate enough to be able to work with guys I got along with very well. We all shared similar interests and had a passion for success, which made working 16-hour days much more bearable. If that were not the case, I have a feeling I would likely get depressed or at least highly stressed out.

4. Have an understanding of startup finances

Before living in the valley, I had very little understanding of the financial end of startups. Being involved in a startup meant I had to learn at least the basics of how startup financing works. While you don’t need a business degree, it helps to know how dilution works, how valuations are calculated, how convertible debt works, etc.

5. Get a gym membership

We made sure to go to the gym at least 4-5 times a week and aside from being a ‘reward’ that I looked forward to most days, I’ve managed to get back into decent shape. I know if I keep it up, I’ll be in the best shape I’ve ever been after a year or so. In my mind, that’s a huge gain for me as a person – I may be working a lot but I know that I’ll look and feel the best I’ve felt in a long time. For the company, it’s a minor expense to make an employee feel great about their self-image and ensure positive mental health.

6. Startups are unpredictable

Companies pivot all the time, some much more than others. Some for the better, some for the worse. Many, many startups fail and it’s pretty hard to predict which will be successful (investing must be hard!). If you’re joining a startup as an employee or a co-founder, make sure you know/trust those involved and that what they’re doing makes sense to you, since it is a huge risk from your end as well. It doesn’t hurt to have a backup plan for what happens when/if it fails, or to have a financial cushion of some kind if you’re not getting a big salary.

7. There’s still a lot of money to be made

Having the opportunity to meet people that were very successful has made me feel differently about financial success, that it is a lot more achievable than I had previously thought. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still incredibly difficult and will take a lot of work, but I have a lot more confidence in ‘hard work pays off,’ having met real-life examples in person.

8. Money is not the end goal, just a means to it

Coming from a semi-poor/lower-middle-class family, I’ve always had a different view of money than a lot of my wealthier friends. I’ve wanted a lot of it for primarily one reason: financial stability for myself and my family, though I had no idea of how much it would take to achieve that. I now understand that it is a lot less than I had originally thought and that once certain things in life are taken care of, money doesn’t mean as much. For me, it is much more meaningful to make an impact on those around me rather than have a big bank account.

There are a few other points as well that I’ll share in another post in the near future, but that’s all for now. For those of you who’ve made it this far down the post, I’m planning on having a giveaway sometime next week for DevGrow readers. So far, Tyler from VirtualHostX has pledged a couple of copies of his excellent software and I’m working on a couple of more leads. If there’s something your company can offer for the 40,000+ readers, let me know in the comments!

New Job

I’ve started a new job as a front-end engineer and designer for a startup in the Bay area. It’s a small startup with big ambitions, and I’ll be updating you guys on the lessons I learn while working here from time to time.

New Design

The new design is aimed at being as minimal as possible. Gone are the plethora of share buttons, excessive images and unnecessary features – all that remains are the tools needed to read the blog and navigate the archives. I’m also trying a left-aligned design, however if I find it uncomfortable I’ll likely center it within a few weeks (or days?).

Upcoming Posts

I wanted to start a new chapter of DevGrow, one that focuses more on my personal experiences and the knowledge I gain from the various projects I work on. This means less ‘Top xyz Programs to Build Traffic’ and posts aimed at beginners, instead I want to focus more on the technical and analytical side of things. Hopefully this will do two things: a) make it easier to come up with topics to write about and b) create an archive of useful thoughts for future reference.

Top 5 Code Editors Used by DevGrow Readers:

1. Notepad++
2. Dreamweaver
3. Eclipse
4. NetBeans
5. Textmate

Dreamweaver… what the?!

I can understand the love for Notepad++, I use it daily as my preferred coding editor, but are that many people still using Dreamweaver? I remember using Dreamweaver in my earlier days of web development but quickly outgrew it as I moved on to what I thought was better software. I decided to take a look at Dreamweaver again and was surprised to find that it’s come a long way since the Dreamweaver MX days – it has been updated to include a lot of modern and useful features, like:

• Multiscreen Preview Panel – Lets you preview in multiple different resolutions (web, iPhone, tablet, etc.) and browser engines
• jQuery Mobile Integration – You can start a new project using jQuery Mobile that lays out a skeleton framework, which means you can make a mobile app in literally minutes
• CSS3/HTML5 Support – It supports cool effects like CSS3 transitions and HTML5 goodies

Seeing the promotional videos on the Dreamweaver site almost makes me want to download the trial version and give it a shot. So I have a question for you readers who actually use Dreamweaver on a day-to-day basis – do you really like it? Have you tried other IDEs like Eclipse and if so, why do you prefer Dreamweaver over them?

New Poll

This month, I wanted to use the poll to actually help me out a bit in terms of determining what kind of content you guys prefer from DevGrow. I want to make this site as useful as possible for the maximum number of people and I think it will help to see where the most demand is in terms of content topics. If you have more suggestions for what you want to see, feel free to leave them in the comments!

Slower Pace

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve only been updating the site once every other week or so recently, as I’ve been extremely busy with client work. It may be like that for another month or two before I can ramp up the pace. If you’re interested in contributing to DevGrow with an article or two, get in touch with me and we’ll set it up.

As always, be sure to follow @ThinkDevGrow on Twitter and Like Us on Facebook!

Even if you don’t end up using the elements themselves, consider taking a look at the blending effects to see how they were achieved. I’ll be using this kit and others like it to help create Photoshop mockups for clients more quickly, it saves time not having to remake elements over and over again (obvious I know, not sure why I didn’t consider it earlier).

As always, please leave feedback in the comments and let me know if you like the set!

Yes, you can be successful too.

Too many times have I seen friends and colleagues with high aspirations get shot down because of the supposed rareness of success in their respective industries, the volatile nature of the economy or a host of other ‘potential’ reasons. While I admit that many of them are probably not cut out to be famous athletes or business moguls, constantly hearing that they don’t have a chance at all kills any aspiration they might have to begin with.

Belief in oneself plays a key role in motivating people to work harder at whatever they’re pursuing. For an entrepreneur, the idea that success may not be that far-fetched can often provide that extra push to actually succeeding. I often get asked, “how many Bill Gates’ are out there for every person that tries and fails?” (substitute Bill for any other successful businessman) Well, if Bill Gates can do it, why can’t I? Or anyone else for that matter? The truth is that you can – anyone can – if they want it enough to do something about it. Googling ‘rags-to-riches’ is evidence enough that people can overcome some of the hardest situations to reach success.

Well, if Bill Gates can do it, why can’t I? Or anyone else for that matter? The truth is that you can – anyone can – if they want it enough to do something about it.

It’s easy to argue that there are a lot of external factors that led to their success and in truth there probably  were, however a big part of it was their confidence. They believed in themselves and used that motivation to push them to greater levels. It’s easy to fall into the realm of ‘wannabe’ entrepreneurs who spend their time talking things up and reading books but fall short when it comes time to act. They may end up stuck in the same story for years and years, unable to move forward because of a list of excuses. Whatever your excuse is, there is a way to get around it if you look hard enough.

It’s important to realize that while not everyone is equal in intellect, skill set or financial situation, success for the greater part is something that should be attainable with enough hard work and dedication. Failure is a part of the journey – learn from your mistakes and move on.

The Trickle Effect

Believing in yourself and your company provides confidence not only to you but to everyone you work as well. Confident employees and cofounders are ones that have motivation to work hard because they expect success. Your role as their leader is to ensure that they maintain confident and have belief in the company through all of your ups and downs. Knowing that success is not impossible can increase productivity and lift the spirits of the people you come in contact with (leaving lasting impressions).

Some quotes to get you motivated from some influential people:

The turning point, I think, was when I really realized that you can do it yourself. That you have to believe in you because sometimes that’s the only person that does believe in your success but you.
- Tim Bixworth, lumber tycoon

Whatever qualities the rich may have, they can be acquired by anyone with thetenacity to become rich. The key, I think, is confidence. Confidence and an unshakable belief it can be done and that you are the one to do it.
- Felix Dennis, MAXIM

I believe in giving everything my best shot. I do not believe in holding back. I am very driven by the fact that we are destined with these opportunities.
- Shailendra Singh, Sequoia Capital India

Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
- Sam Walton, Wal-mart & Sam’s Club

Self-esteem is a huge piece of my work. You have to believe it’s possible and believe in yourself. Because after you’ve decided what you want, you have to believe it’s possible, and possible for you, not just for other people.
- Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Soul

This is one of the original DevGrow article’s from 2008 that was lost in transition. This is the last of the oldies, moving on to new content next week.