I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new website for The Word Works—a Yokohama, Japan based translation company.  The Word Works has been providing translation services to an impressive list of clients for over a decade, and it’s principals have also been authors and contributors to a number of books.

From a business perspective, goals for the new site included getting all content into a CMS (Content Management System) for easier maintenance, better communicating the company history and capabilities, and using business blogs as a marketing tool to let more of the personality and interests of the business owners come through the site.

From an implementation perspective, the new site uses ExpressionEngine as a content management system, with a combination of 12 EE weblogs driving both the “static” portions of the site as well as the five true blogs.

The biggest challenge for me in building the site was that it most of the site had to be multi-lingual, presenting content in both Japanese and English. 

The overall development approach for the multi-lingual capability is taken from this entry on the EEWiki (thanks again Erwin!), essentially building parallel data structures (either weblog fields, embedded templates, or global variables, etc) for each language and using some PHP code to switch between what data the templates pull, based on language choosen by the user.

While overall a very logical approach, implementation still got to be quite a puzzle at times, with features like pagination, categories and search results all needing more attention and logic than a typical ExpressionEngine-based site.

The site’s blogs make also heavy use of EE URL Segments, which allow all five weblogs to share the same presentation templates.

All in all between the language issues and 14 hour offset between the Word Works and myself this proved to be a great learning experience for me, and I’m quite pleased with the results.