".

Bill Dunlap, founder of Euro-Marketing Associates, a company based in
San Francisco and Paris, launched the international marketing
consultancy Global Reach as a methodology for U.S. companies to expand
their internet presence into an international framework. This included
translating a website into other languages, actively promoting it, and
using local online banner advertising to increase local website
traffic.

Bill Dunlap explained in December 1998: "Promoting your website is at
least as important as creating it, if not more important. You should be
prepared to spend at least as much time and money in promoting your
website as you did in creating it in the first place. With the Global
Reach program, you can have it promoted in countries where English is
not spoken, and achieve a wider audience... and more sales. There are
many good reasons for taking the online international market seriously.
Global Reach is a means for you to extend your website to many
countries, speak to online visitors in their own language and reach
online markets there. (...)

Since 1981, when my professional life started, I've been involved with
bringing American companies in Europe. This is very much an issue of
language, since the products and their marketing have to be in the
languages of Europe in order for them to be visible here. Since the web
became popular in 1995 or so, I've turned these activities to their
online dimension, and have come to champion European e-commerce among
my fellow American compatriots. Most lately at Internet World in New
York, I spoke about European e-commerce and how to use a website to
address the various markets in Europe."

Bill added in July 1999: "After a website's home page is available in
several languages, the next step is the development of content in each
language. A webmaster will notice which languages draw more visitors
(and sales) than others, and these are the places to start in a
multilingual web promotion campaign. At the same time, it is always
good to increase the number of languages available on a website: just a
home page translated into other languages would do for a start, before
it becomes obvious that more should be done to develop a certain
language branch on a website."

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to
develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines,
software, and tools) for the web, for example specifications for markup
l