With the Euro hammering Sterling, more and more gite owners are looking to new markets to attract visitors. To do this, you need to be found in the right search engines, for the right search phrases, and then engage with the visitor in their own language to ’seal the deal’.
I’m increasingly asked to design multilingual websites, but have found Wordpress to be quite clunky for this purpose. The page and category structure doesn’t allow for easy creation of entire sub-sites, and until yesterday, the only solution I’d toyed with was installing a copy of Wordpress MU (multiple user) and creating sub blogs for each language. Again, very clunky.
However, as usual, a bit of research has found an excellent plugin which does the trick called WPML. WPML is easily installed and integrated into your existing WP theme. You have two choices; either use the integrated sidebar widgets to put the language options in your sidebar, or with a bit of php and css styling you can integrate the various functions directly into your theme.
I’ve set up a very basic demo here to show how the language selector works, but haven’t applied any styling just yet. I’ll be using it properly on a gite website I’m designing in the next couple of weeks.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
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[...] that in mind, I wrote on here about a clever little multi-lingual plugin I’ve been using on client sites a while back, but since installing it on a few sites [...]