We’ve just completed a full translation of Moosepm.com and it’s looking pretty great!
Used to be if you wanted to make a website bilingual you would have with a landing page that gave you an option to visit the english site or the french site (or any other language!).
The problem with this (besides the annoying landing page!) is that you are essentially building two websites! One for each language. This becomes especially annoying when you need to make changes, everything you change must be changed twice!
With website Content Management Systems such as WordPress or Joomla, you have new options. Multilingual plugins exist that make it so easy to manage multiple languages for articles and blog posts… and it keeps them linked together so that you’re not managing 2 different websites.
You want to manage 2 languages, NOT 2 websites
Another great feature of multilingual plugins is the “language switcher”. With a traditional bilingual website, you are either browsing the french site OR the english site. If you wish to switch over, you must navigate back to the landing page and click on the other language.
A language switcher is a widget or module that contains small buttons for switching languages on any and all pages of your website. So wherever you are on the website, you can simply switch over to another language!