In contrast to a model with a mixture of central and local control, Visa International Corp., of Foster City, Calif., has opted to focus on central management of its six worldwide sites. Visa, whose credit cards are not issued by the corporation but through financial institutions, focuses much of its energy on marketing its brand. No wonder the company doesn't want to allow local worldwide offices to have too much leeway on the content and services offered on the sites. While the regions have the ability to add promotions and content tailored to their markets, those changes must be cleared through corporate management, said Joyce Bustinduy, director of Web content management at Visa. Once global sites are up, the work of maintaining and managing them has only begun.
Ongoing management can be the toughest part of a global Web strategy, experts say.
That's because e-commerce managers must be able to selectively update and translate content globally on a nearly continuous basis. A new group of software and services vendors has developed to address these concerns and build translation workflow and automation tools for multilingual Web sites. Interwoven Inc. The multilingual Web site management software can work especially well for global sites with central management, said Lycos' Haag. That's why Lycos began using Idiom's WorldServer software for the eight sites in Latin America that the company manages on its own. The company's joint ventures are also considering whether to replace proprietary management systems with Idiom.