If you have been with us for these few days, you have gained useful information about designing a multilingual website. Today we want to tell you the third part of this series of web design articles.
Table of Contents
RTL and LTR
Persian and Arabic, unlike Latin languages such as English, are written from right to left (RTL). For this reason, when the second language of the website is one of these languages that are right-aligned (RTL), the entire layout for the second language needs to be symmetrical. Layout design symmetrically means that all the visual components of the site are perfectly aligned, such as text, photos, menu bar, buttons, drop-down menus, sidebars, and so on.
URL structure
As the language of the website changes, so does the URL. This change requires an appropriate structure. There are several ways to create a URL structure in designing a multilingual website.
CcTLD method
This method is one of the common ways to create a URL structure based on the selected language. In this method, each Top-Level Domain corresponding to each country is considered for a language. For example domain.fr for French and domain.es for Spanish.
The most important advantage of this method is that this signal is sent to search engines which country is the target of each domain address. The biggest disadvantage of this method is that the number of such domains is limited and on the other hand it costs a lot to buy multiple domains on websites that support several different languages.
Subdomain + gTLD method
Major domains such as .com or .net and .org are not country-specific. Therefore, a subdomain can be used when changing languages. For example, fr.domain.com represents French or ir.domain.com for Persian. Creating this type of domain is easy and many search engines are able to understand the geographical differences in domains.
Subdirectory + gTLD method
Subdirectories are almost the opposite of subdomains. Subdirectories are commonly used to categorize site content, for example Domain.com/Articles belongs to the category of articles or Domain.com/Services belongs to the category of website services. But it can also be used to specify the language of the website. For example, Domain.com/fr represents the French version of the website. This method is easier than other methods and you can even specify different languages and target countries for Google through Google Search Console. The disadvantage of this method is that it may not be very clear to users that, for example, domain.com/de is for German or is it a category?