I'm not a programmer, but I have a little company website that I developed with MS Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (not Visual Studio), so I'm not completely inept. I want to add French and Spanish languages to my website. So some websites have, for instance, ?lang=fr after the URL or something similar.
Because I'm not a professional hard-core programmer, I need programs with a user-friendly GUI. Unlike Visual Studio, Visual Web Developer 2010 doesn't have friendly options for adding languages, or easy-to-comprehend tutorials on the web.
So I was thinking about just having the regular pages in my website as my English pages. Then, I can make /FR/ and /ES/ directories, and just copy all the aspx and aspx.vb pages to their respective directories and translate them. Then I would give the end-user a choice on the homepage to click "French" or "Espanol". So an end-user who clicks French would be directed to domain/FR/default.aspx.
Is this thinking wrong? Is there a simpler, easier way to accomplish 3 languages? Is there a more PROFESSIONAL way that looks more professional that I might understand?
I can install JQuery plugins. Anyone who can help me achieve this is a Godsend! Thank you for your time in reading this, and I sincerely appreciate any and all guidance you can offer!
Jason Weber
This thinking is not wrong, but it does have a downside: every change you make to your pages you will have to repeat for all copies (e.g. changing the layout, fixing a bug or adding an image).
What most ASP.NET developers generally prefer to do, is to keep one set of pages, put all content that can be translated into so-called resource files and then let the server select the language content based on the user's choice.
This step-by-step tutorial on MSDN will help you to get your site localized in different languages using Visual Web Developer:
Walkthrough: Using Resources for Localization with ASP.NET
In this tutorial, the browser indicates the user's preferred language. So it doesn't use a separate menu to select the language. I suggest you first get familiar with ASP.NET resources and implicit localization, as this will introduce a lot of new concepts.
If you have localized your site this way, you can always switch to explicit localization, while still using the resources you have created by following the tutorial above.