I need to build a website in Armenian language for a client. This is going to be my first non-English website and I need some help with it. What type of fonts, doc type, language code or charset (If it matters) should I use to get it to work on all major browsers and for the Armenian-speaking visitors around the world? I have seen some websites where the font is displayed as some weird symbols or “???” makes. I don’t want to have this problem. I need to get the content to be accusable and readable in Armenian.
The main thing is to use utf-8 encoding. That covers the biggest character set. You can include this in your web pages by placing this after the <head> tag:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
but you also need to ensure that your server is sending out the pages with uft-8 encoding, as this overrides the on-page encoding.
You can also specify a language for each page, such as
<html [COLOR="#FF0000"]lang="hy"[/COLOR]>
which is supposed to help browsers and search engines deal with the page appropriately.
You can just use a normal doctype of your choice.
In terms of fonts, it probably doesn’t matter, as long as you use something that’s common on Armenian computers and that has the required characters. (Most fonts seem to have a wide character set these dyas, but I’m not familiar with the Armenian alphabet.)
And do you sugesst getting an armenian hosting form Armenia?
I doubt that it makes any difference at all. I prefer local hosting just because it’s fractionally faster for me, so perhaps at least a European host is a good option, so that Armenian surfers don’t have to wait longer for the page to load. I guess the closer the host is to your visitors, the faster the pages with load … unless the host’s servers are very slow. 