Local Country Sites

I've had a number of emails asking questions about the local country sites. Localization is something that we spent a lot of time thinking about when we were in the planning stages, but less time talking about since. Or at least, when we have been talking about it, we've been doing it on a one-on-one basis. It feels like it's time to share some of our thinking. Porter Novelli's network of global agencies that has been built through expansion, acquisition, and partnership. Not all these agencies are hosted on porternovelli.com's central web servers in Boston. The needs and current practices of local office sites were taken into account when developing this project.

Sites we looked at

Other agencies

Still other agencies inside the network are neither hosted, nor have Porter Novelli-branded domains.

Language

One of the options we explored was to "sniff" the IP address of visitors to see where they were coming from. This is somewhat accurate, and is used regularly to target online display advertising. Off the back of this, we hoped to be able to give visitors a site that was translated into their local language. Of course this went by the wayside very quickly for a number of reasons. Cost and development time implications, of course were two of those. But deeper thought revealed that this would actually be a negative user experience. Many countries, for example, have more than one official language (among them Canada, Switzerland and Belgium). More to the point, I often travel with my laptop. It would be disconcerting to say the least if I were in (say) Dubai, and the Porter Novelli global site was only available in Arabic. So we decided to make the global site English language (American-English variant) and decided that local sites were best left up to local offices (and local compliance laws.)

So what happens with the country offices?

Each local office (including US local offices) will have its own page on the new site. The page will look something like this:

There will be space for local office news, job postings, and the like (this content will also be available elsewhere on the site, and can be re-used on local sites.) Once the new site has launched, country offices will be encouraged to move their own sites over to the new CMS and templates. But that's a bridge that we'll cross as we get to it.