Hello all, Jr. web developer here. I developed a website for a company about a year ago using basic HTML, CSS/Sass, and a little JavaScript and jQuery. It was one of the first larger websites I designed and developed so if I was to redo this site today I would approach it a bit differently. The company now wants the site to support Multilanguage, English being the default and 2 additional languages.
Being a static site what are my options now that it's already complete? The site is roughly a dozen or so pages and really the only area that gets updated is the news section.
How would you approach this? Any feedback is greatly appreciated, thanks!
Top comments (4)
The company is paying for the English version to be translated so I'll have all the text.
Chinese will be the first translation followed by Spanish. The company has mentioned they want different domains as well so I'm not sure how I manage this without essentially copying the site and pasting in the other language.
Thanks Sebastian for the response. I agree that the copy and paste solution is pretty straight forward for now but becomes a real burden later on down the road. It quite literally triples my work load whenever there's an update.
The client is well aware that each update will take longer and is OK with it until I find a better solution. They want a small button on the nav that allows you to switch to the desired language, which in this case will be another separate site entirely.
I'm interested in exploring other solutions in the long term, I don't currently know PHP and have explored using JS and JSON files to populate the text but I'm not sure if this is a more optimal solution.
Is there a JS framework that could handle this that I could incorporate? Or perhaps PHP is the way to go? Looking forward to learning how to incorporate this request to develop better websites.
Thanks Erick, I'll be sure to check it out. Appreciate the response.
Thanks for the response. I've never worked with either of these, perhaps I'll just try to launch a simple site using Eleventy to see how it all works.