Deloitte: Localising links

A country site locator suffers from complexity and multi-lingual pretensions.

The Site

Deloitte, the international accountancy firm, has two routes to country websites on most pages of its global website: Locations, a link in the main horizontal navigation bar, and Global Site Selector, a dropdown menu at the very top of the page alongside the Search panel. But visitors may arrive at a different site depending which way they choose to go.

From Locations, users are taken to an index page that itself offers a choice of ways to find a country site: an interactive global map or a list of country names. Using the map involves clicking on first a region, then a country, at which point the local-language home page of the country website opens in the browser window. The list uses local-language spellings and scripts for country names (with the English equivalent in brackets) along with an indication of the languages in which the site is available – often this is English only, even when the name is rendered in the local language.

On the Global Site Selector country names are in English only but, in cases where a local language version exists, clicking on the name opens the localised site.

The Takeaway

Deloitte’s web presence reflects the importance of localisation to the firm as a business strategy, and it goes about it with a rare and generally assured thoroughness. However, its country site locator system is groaning under the weight of its own complexity and pretensions. This has led it to project two different, and somewhat contradictory, messages about how the firm chooses to ‘act global talk local’.

With its Locations list, Deloitte is demonstrating very visibly the considerable effort it will make to communicate with people in their own language. On the other hand, the Global Site Selector menu presumes to use the global business language, English – but then performs the courtesy of opening, where it exists, the local language version of the site (as does the interactive map).

Deloitte could harmonise the local flavouring of the two routes by using localised spellings in the Global Site Selector list, which would be a simple but effective indication that a localised site is available and about to open. Or it could question whether it really needs two distinct links to the locator system on the page template.

First published on 01 March, 2007