Using Weglot to Create a Multilingual Squarespace Site for “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook”
We collaborated with Weglot and Co-Conspirator Press to create a multilingual showcase site on Squarespace for Co-Co’s publication, “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook,” written by Veronica Camille Ratliff.
Teaming Up With Weglot
Weglot, founded in France in 2016, helps businesses make their websites multilingual. They offer a fast, simple, and user-friendly way to perform and display language translations, without needing the help of a developer. Weglot’s mission is to help companies grow their businesses around the world. We stepped in to find a way to help them embody that motive.
The Challenge
In our recent project for an online education e-commerce website, we used the Weglot WordPress plugin as a tool to translate their online store into French. After Weglot saw that we were using their translation service, they reached out to us for help making a Squarespace showcase site for demonstrating their service. With an inclination to amplify the voices of organizations doing good for their communities, we collectively agreed to focus the site on a publication from Co-Conspirator Press, a small publication platform in Los Angeles. Co-Co Press works with the Women's Center for Creative Work to help independent artists, writers, designers, printers, social justice workers, and editors from historically marginalized communities share their voices.
After proposing the project to them, we decided to showcase “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook” by author Veronica Camille Ratliff on the site. To demonstrate Weglot’s product, a digital version of this book was created, translated into both English and Spanish.
Weglot’s request was simple. Showcase their product in the best way possible. Since the website was also featuring Co-Conspirator Press, it was important to make sure we were properly representing both brands and their values.
Our Approach
Since this was a rather unique project, we chose to forego our normal strategy phase, our rusty trusty Pilot Phase. This was also our first time teaming up with another web services type of company to create a website that wasn’t solely focused on their product or service, so it was a fully organic, collaborative process, that allowed us to work closely together throughout the entire project. Our goal was to focus the design on the aesthetic of the book, “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook” because it boasted a gorgeous color palette and versatile design elements we were able to source for creating animations to use on the site. While the aesthetic of the book was our main influence in design, we wanted to also clearly demonstrate Weglots language switcher and multilingual capabilities, working it seamlessly into the look and feel of the site.
The Technology
We worked side by side with Weglot, as well as Co-Conspirator Press, to design and develop the site on Squarespace 7 using the Sonora template (in the Brine family) as our starting point. We turned on Developer Mode which allowed us to make some of the customizations we wanted to, some being SVG scroll animations and site background color switching on scroll, among some other tweaks. While this was a fully custom build, the amount of time to integrate Weglot’s technology was rather minimal.
The Future With Weglot
Thanks to Weglot’s technology, we can now build sites with multilingual and translation capabilities for our clients. This would have required hours of custom dev time before, but not anymore.
Now it’s your turn. Head over to Weglot.com to see about how you can offer your content in multiple languages.