Design and consideration of multilingual website construction database

Due to the increasing number of dynamic applications on websites, many websites still use files or databases to store application information. Therefore, if the content stored in files or databases is related to the language, pay special attention to this feature. For information stored in the database, you can use the following methods to support multiple languages:
1. multiple languages are supported at the database level: an independent database is created for each language, and users in different languages operate on different databases.
2. Table-level support for multiple languages: create independent tables for each language. Users in different languages operate different tables, but they are in the same database.
3. Supports multiple languages at the field level: create independent fields for each language in the same table. Users in different languages operate different fields in the same table.
Because the database has a large amount of information (such as signs, encoding, numbers, and so on) used for internal processing and has nothing to do with the language, supporting multiple languages at the database level can result in a great waste of space, the biggest problem with field-level multi-language support is that once a new language is needed, the table structure needs to be modified, which is difficult to maintain and has poor scalability.
In contrast, it is better to support multiple languages at the table level, because not all tables need to support multiple languages. For languages-independent tables, users in different languages share one set, language-related tables are created based on the types of Supported languages. Users in different languages access different tables. This makes the maintenance simple and saves storage space, and makes it easier to expand. You only need to create one more table that supports multiple languages.

Consider the following factors before designing and developing a multilingual website:

1. application character set selection
An enterprise website located in countries of different languages is bound to provide product and sales information in multiple languages to satisfy customers and partners who use different languages around the world, these include French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Arabic. However, one problem is easily overlooked by website designers. This is the problem of website Character Set settings.
Generally, we use the simplified Chinese (gb2312) Character Set. for multilingual websites, the Chinese Character Set may make your hard work hard. The reason is simple: This is the inconspicuous little character set.
There are dozens of different character sets in the computer application field. When users in different languages browse webpages in different languages, garbled characters often occur because the character sets used by each other are incompatible. When we browse some foreign websites, we often have to switch back and forth between various character sets to see the information on the website normally.
Think about it: if a website provides content in Chinese, English, French, German, and other language versions, the content is complete and complete, and the design is magnificent. We thought it was perfect to browse these non-Chinese-version pages in the Chinese encoding environment. Now a French customer is interested in your product. When he enters the French layout, he can see that there are a lot of garbled characters, the layout may even collapse. What is the significance of making another effort on your website?
Therefore, the Unicode Character Set should be the most ideal choice for websites with multilingual versions.
It is a double-byte encoding mechanism character set. both eastern and western texts are expressed in Unicode in two bytes. Therefore, at least 65536 different characters can be defined, it can cover almost every character of all common languages in the world. Therefore, when designing and developing multilingual websites, you must first define the character set of non-Chinese pages as "UTF-8" format, that is:
√:
×:
This step is very important because it is a very thankless job to change the character set after the page is completed. Sometimes it may even need to start from scratch and re-enter the text content of the website.

2. Language writing habits & navigation structure
In some countries, the language writing habits are from right to left, such as Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew used in many Middle East regions. If your market target is a country in these languages, you need to consider these special language writing habits in website design. And if you use a vertical navigation bar in the website navigation structure design, you should put it on the right, rather than the left as we used.

3. database-driven websites
For a database-driven website, especially when customers can leave a message and add information to the database, they should consider how to collect and retrieve data in different languages technically.

4. Search Engine & Marketing
for multilingual websites, search engine optimization (SEO) is indeed a big problem. Note that not all mainstream search engines support multilingual web pages, which is why a multilingual website is not necessarily indexed by all mainstream search engines. Of course, Google does not have such a problem.
next, we need to consider what search engines or portals are used by different target countries and customers in different languages for search? Just as we are used to Baidu search, the most widely used search engines or portals in some languages are still in our country.