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Business Wales is a Welsh Government programme. It offers information, advice and guidance to new and existing small and medium-sized enterprises in Wales.
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Customers can reach Business Wales through a telephone helpline (03000 6 03000), a face-to face service, online through the website (businesswales.gov.wales & busnescymru. llyw.cymru) and various social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and an e-newsletter). These services need to be available bilingually so that customers can choose whether to use them in Welsh or English.
Business Wales online is important both in its range of content and reach into the business community. Around 20,000 visitors per week visit the Business Wales ‘family of sites’ (sites either branded Business Wales or sitting on the Business Wales platform), and over 800,000 unique visitors have visited the core Business Wales site since 1 April 2014. Business Wales has around 100,000 subscriptions to its social media channels and e-newsletter.
The website features a number of areas (zones) containing in-depth information on subjects proven to be of interest to a wide range of businesses. The Business Wales Marketing Zone is one of those areas and contains information in a wide range of formats (blog posts, case studies, guides, videos) on popular themes in sales and marketing.
We work hard in Business Wales to engage with businesses of all sizes. We’re trying to be as innovative as we can to give businesses the support they need.
The Marketing Zone is accessible directly and via the main website and bears Business Wales branding. The regularly-updated zone is a syndicated version of the ‘vanilla’ Marketing Donut product, supplied by a third party, Atom Marketing, a specialist content marketing agency. Atom produces its content in English only.
The need for a multilingual application
Under the terms of Welsh Government bilingual policy, Business Wales treats Welsh and English equally. Business Wales also aims to encourage and improve take-up of business support services in Welsh.
The main Business Wales website is available in English and Welsh, but the Marketing Zone is produced in English only. This clearly conflicts with the letter and spirit of Welsh Government’s Welsh language policy.
Whether our customers want to read information in English or Welsh, we endeavour to give them content in the way they prefer to receive it.
Why LinguaSkin?
Marketing Donut content is not available in Welsh. The site does not have multilingual content management or publication capabilities, and due to the size of the site and its ever-changing content, there is no easy and economic way of making it bilingual.
Business Wales saw that LinguaSkin had the potential to provide this content bilingually. Furthermore, as LinguaSkin is non-invasive, it does not interfere with the Marketing Donut site.
In a broader context, LinguaSkin offers Business Wales independence from third party suppliers. It can now procure whichever content source best suits its needs whilst ensuring bilingualism, irrespective of whether the underlying system has multilingual capabilities. The organisation will be able to retain more control, and as it will not have to develop multilingual capability, as it has done in the past, it will benefit from cost savings.
LinguaSkin is the missing link; we can give our customers what they want and it’s helping us deliver our bilingual policy.
Quick to implement
LinguaSkin was implemented according to PRINCE2 methodology. The system was configured and then implemented on a test site. LinguaSkin scraped the current content so it could be translated by the Business Wales team. Content was updated and the system thoroughly tested before going live.
The system was deployed to a Business Wales server and configured as a reverse proxy to the Marketing Donut site. As with all LinguaSkin implementations, there were no changes to the underlying application.
It was quite remarkable how comprehensively the site was transformed. It did exactly what Interceptor Solutions said it would do.
An essential aspect of Atom’s service is a regular Google Analytics report. The transparency of LinguaSkin means this is not impaired in any way.
Easy to use
Business Wales was concerned about how it could keep up with the regularly changing content. Fortunately, the LinguaSkin Management Centre provides this capability. Staff received training in how to add new pages/content and apply translations to them.
The handover of the configuration and translation activity was a key aspect of this project. Though the concept of reverse proxying and transforming web content is technically complex, the LinguaSkin Management Centre and the support from Interceptor Solutions makes this complex issue completely achievable and manageable by non-technical staff.
Interceptor Solutions has supported us every step of the way. Their continual support has been great.
Cost-effective
The only recurring cost is for the annual license fee which includes maintenance and support. If Business Wales decide to use LinguaSkin on other applications, the ability to have a multi-application license will offer even more value and savings.
We’re looking at bringing in more content from third parties and also providing a bilingual interface for other applications. LinguaSkin can definitely help us do that.
Key Points
- Capability - third party content delivered multilingually without a multilingual CMS
- Risk - minimal disruption. No impact and insulation provided via reverse proxy
- Quick - straight forward and rapid implementation
- Third party software - implemented on a fully functional third party content rich site
- Cost - cost effective to implement and small ongoing operational costs compared to the implementation of a multilingual CMS
- Easy maintenance - Management Centre enables maintenance of configuration, content and translations by non-technical users.
Technical details
| Deployment: | Reverse Proxy on Microsoft IIS |
| Web Server: | Apache |
| CMS: | Drupal |
| Content types: | HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSON |
| Languages: | EN, CY |
| Num matches: | 2753 |
Acknowledgement of support
Through its Welsh-language Technology and Digital Media grant, the Welsh Government has funded several LinguaSkin implementation case studies to research the potential of multilingual software interfaces. Business Wales and Interceptor Solutions acknowledge this support.
