New Localized Download Pages
By clicking on this link, you’ll see the newly created download page for Firefox in Afrikaans.
This is an example of how the l10n-drivers team is trying hard to listen to our l10n community, and trying even harder to act upon the suggestions. We gathered feedback from a lot of locale leaders who thought we should experiment by creating individual download pages for locales who did not have a localized site featuring their version of Firefox. This idea was only validated when Chofmann traveled to Argentina and heard from some that 70% of Argentinians are using the es-ES (Spain) version of Firefox because search results pointed users to the Mozilla Europe es-ES page.
So, we joined up with marketing and web-dev to take on the experiment and made it a quarterly goal for the localization team. We started by researching which locales lacked a download page. Several of the European locales have such a page due to the great work in the past by our localizers and Mozilla Europe. But, for those who didn’t, we took on the effort to create ones. We should have as many as 40 new sites pointing to localizations by the end of this month. Special thanks to Pascalc, Laura Mesa, John Slater, Clouserw, and Oremj who did all this, and to the localizers who translated their pages. Let’s see how it impacts downloads.
Tears of joy!
This is solving one of the most frustrating aspects involved in promoting Firefox in South Africa. We focus firstly on the localisation of the product and less on the other site aspects. So we simply could not point our users to a single Afrikaans page that we new would deliver the Afrikaans Firefox that we wanted them to install. There computer is most likely in English so they get told to install English. Also most South African’s will not change their browsers preferred language, so that isnot an option for us. What we did was to point them to the all.html page, which is still in English. That works for Afrikaans, since its on the top of the list, but it really won’t work for anyone else.
Now we can make press releases that point to an Afrikaans page, an Afrikaans users will get a full Afrikaans experience when they go to download Firefox and we will can rest assured that our users are getting what we want them to get.
@seth: Please share my heartfelt thanks with the team, this really has made me very happy today
I think that we should provide there as much as local content as possible, and even provide visible link to the local community website, so it will be introduction to the product and the community.
I am working for some time on providing bidi support to that page. Thanks for asking.
Congratulations to the Afrikaans language team and all Mozilla support for this commitment!
Sure it is a crucial step.
Now to ensure “an Afrikaans users will get a full Afrikaans experience”, may I suggest that some of the most popular extensions should be available for Afrikaans as well. I am thinking of extensions like Adblock, Downthemall, Noscript…
Once the 5 or 10 top ones are translated, why not set a link on this new page pointing to the list of available stuff for af-ZA?
Of course, BabelZilla is welcoming translators for af-ZA if they wish to indulge a little time on that.
Currently, there is only one really active translator for this language (can be contacted here http://www.leuce.com/).
Tomer, there is a block of text in the page to promote a local community site. In the case of Afrikaans, it is translate.org, but for locales with a support/news community, that would be more a mozillazine like site
Goofy, that’s actually something I have also been thinking of
Typing in Mozilla.com in my browser and being greeted in a 100% Afrikaans page (save the copyright message) makes me feel like a first class citizen of the web. It is not a feeling I get with many websites, not even in South Africa.
Many, many thanks for this. I’d like to hear from the web team what the shortest, simplest URL is that will definitely make us end at this page. From a quick experiment it seems to be http://mozilla.com/af/ (af.mozilla.com doesn’t work)
Thanks again.
Friedel, http://mozilla.com/af/ is fine ofr quick communication, officially though, the url will be http://www.mozilla.com/af/ even though we currently show http://af.www.mozilla.com/af/ (we will drop the sub-domain soon for all locales, it’s just confusing).
Also, getfirefox.com will soon redirect users having af as their first accepted language header parameter to mozilla.com/af
I can’t wait to see en-GB in the URL!