The Content Manager: a tool to develop multilingual and multi-preference Web sites

The authors outline their experience in developing a multilingual and multiple preference Web site. In particular we describe Content Manager, a tool we developed to support the implementation of a business to consumer (B2C) international Web site. We also describe the business requirements and challenges that we encountered. There are many commercial tools for managing a Web site's content, but these tools are unable to manage the complexity of diverse languages' taxation frameworks, and cultural systems. We found that by separating the content from the source code (as supposed to embedding text within the Web page), we were able to focus on the development of the Web site instead of worrying about the differences between target countries. Content Manager allowed us to maintain this separation and eased the development process.