Language selection on home page vs single language with link to the other -- opinions

I would appreciate any opinions on this.

I am building a site for my company which deals in foreign trade consultancy in Turkey. The aim of the site is:

1. to provide visitors (mainly foreign) demands and supplies of our clients,
2. to provide demands and offers of our overseas associates to both Turkish and foreign visitors,
3. to introduce our services to mainly Turkish companies

That said, the target audience is both Turkish (especially SME's who have difficulties in language and access to foreign markets) and other nationals engaged in foreign trade. Obviously the site will be on both languages depending on users choice.

My dilemma is, whether I should make a home page with two columns, one in English and one in Turkish and have the user to make their choice of language on the home page, or to have the home page in one single language (English would be my choice considering SEO) with a link to the other.

Some pros and cons I can think of (I'm not sure of any of them):

- Having introductory text in two languages on home page can distract the first time visitor and also limit the home page navigation to only two links to the main pages of the desired language (of course unles I overcrowd the page with links to content pages of both languages).
- Having two languages on home page could (I'm not sure) rank my page in search engines when searched in Turkish
- With two languages on home page, I have an opportunity to grab user browser and window size details via javascript and whether or not javasript is enabled as the page uses a form and these can be passed to the next page to evaluate them (I'm coding in classic ASP).
- Having an English home page with all links to English content and a link as "Turkish" could pose a negative impact on my Turkish clients.
- Having an English home page with links to the content of the site (which I cannot give with the two column choice) would enable search engine spiders to go deep in site.
- Having a single language page strictly defines your audience. I've been to such sites, Russian or Chinese on home page and went back without searching for the link for English.

These are my pros and cons. I'd love to hear your thoughts -- from the useability and IA pros, but especially from novoices

Many thanks in advance.

Celal
cozt@nova-trade.com

Celal,

I really like how you've thought this out and sought other opinions before plunging in. If more people thought like you...

Another thing to consider is how you anticipate visitors reaching your site. If most of the traffic will come from search engines, each visitor will be searching in their own language and will link to the site-version in their own language. In this case, two separate sites (mysite.com/eng and mysite.com/turk) are fine.

If salesmen are going to be handing out business cards with URL on them to both English and Turkish speaking clients who will be typing it directly into their browser...well then, you'll definitely want to make it clear that you have both an English and a Turkish version, which one do they want?

Hope this helps even a little!

Hello numbermine, just got alert of your feedback, many thanks.

Also, thank you for the consideration. Yes, I have thought a lot about it, but in such cases I believe the opinions of 'others', those who are not involved in design and development processes of the specific site are most valuable because they are objective. I did consider not including the pros and cons according to myself, not to affect anyone replying.

Well, to the case; both of your assumptions apply.

We have international agents whou would not put our URL on their business cards but would relay potential buyers/sellers to our site.

We also serve foreign entities in researching their import/export needs in Turkey. Thus, we need to get a high rank with a search such as "Exports of Turkey (and like)", "tarding with Turkey" (and like) etc.

And as for the next, our salesmen will be contacting primarily with Turkish prospects. My question is here:
A foreign user may run away seeing a Turkish homepage
A non-English speaking Turkish prospect would not be interested.

Still I am making comment where I should be expecting them. I have posted the same in Design Forum with a poll at
http://forums.devarticles.com/t5767/s.html

I'd love to hear your feedback

Thanks again
Celal