Expats in Italy need to stay on top of professional and daily happenings locally while still engaging in the wider world. This task is made difficult by the vast quantity and quality of resources available in English (my native language), as exemplified by the BBC. Unfortunately, their Italian equivalents, such as the ad-infested public broadcaster RAI, just can’t compete for my attention.

It doesn’t get much easier on the web marketing front. The primary search engines in Italy are the US based Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask, sometimes found in their rebranded skins: Arianna (enhanced by Google) and Virgilio (listed by Google as a customer). Inevitably, most of my web marketing reading is English language centric.

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At yesterday’s ZenaCamp in Genova, I gave a presentation on the main issues that are frequently encountered when creating sites for an international audience:

• Language
• Accented Characters and Symbols
• Language Variants
• Culture

A particular focus was made on user issues, such as providing a page in the right language to a site visitor while allowing them to override the choice – and remembering their choice upon successive site visits.

Search engine optimization was also discussed as there are several techniques which can be used to help search engines correctly identify a web page’s language.

If you’d like a copy of the presentation, please contact me.

Gianfranco Chicco captured several happy campers right after lunch!

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