Many websites are developed for an audience local to the company. There are developers who don’t consider the product that they’re developing may be used in another country, in another timezone, or even another language. Whether this is a budgetary issue or just being short-sighted with respect to who uses the product, it’s important to consider usage outside the box.

Supporting different countries, timezones and languages opens up a whole bunch of opportunities from other cultures and markets. The internet is called the world wide web for a reason. It encompasses people around the world. If people cannot understand what your website does because they don’t read the one language your website supports, you will miss the opportunity for a whole group of people and the markets they are in.

While it may be easy to say these are important and that they should be supported by every website, there are many logistics behind implementing them. Languages require templating and translating all the text in your service. If no one speaks a particular language in your team, a third party is necessary to translate the content. Futhermore, a fourth-party needs to verify that such translations are correct and don’t include offensive alternate meanings. With future updates to the service, new content will need to be translated as well, so an ongoing contract may be necessary.

Timezones are tricky. Converting timestamps into different timezones is trivial. One issue is that people in different timezones need to consider that people they chat with may be sound asleep for another four hours. Shifting conversations to odd hours of the day may be important.

As far as being in different countries, you want to keep your service (servers and support) close to your audience’s location. The farther the distance, the longer the delay can be. If an act of terrorism affects one country, your service shouldn’t crumble to a halt. Having backup plans for each country is a good exercise to practice.

This topic can be very complex and take companies years to implement. In some cases legal issues may prevent your service from being available to other countries, such as video and music licensing agreements. Keeping an open mind about people outside of your box during planning and development will keep the door open should it become feasible in the future.