Creating a Multilingual Site

Introduction

This article is a guide to creating a multilingual site, whereby you have two or more copies of a site, each in a different language.

To do so, multiple sites are created, one for each language, along with an extra site that acts as a "gateway" to the individual language sites. The end result is a layout of sites like this:

Multilingual Site Layout.png

Creating the Site

The Gateway Site

First, we are going to create the "gateway" site that leads visitors to the available languages.

Choose "New Site" from the File menu. Give the new site an appropriate name like "Gateway" and choose a location to save the document.

Pick a suitable design for the site and then lay out the content of the Home Page something like this:

Multilingual Site Gateway.png

You may wish to "beautify" things a little by perhaps including appropriate flags for each language.

Next we need to make the links to each language actually work!

For each language:

Select the text of the link.
Click the "Create Link" item in the toolbar.
Enter the address of your site with the appropriate language. So, for English and French, you would enter something like this:

http://www.example.com/english
http://www.example.com/french

Repeat for each language.

Finally, you need to publish the gateway site.

To publish the gateway site;

Work through the instructions in "Host Setup Assistant." Do not enter a subfolder.
Publish the site by clicking the "publish" item in the toolbar.

The Individual Language Sites

We now need to set up the individual language sites.