Positioning Vita Student’s website for the Chinese market
与我们讨论如何帮助您在中国推出网站 – Talk to us about how we can help you launch your website in China
Introduction
What do you do when you offer accommodation to international students, but your website doesn’t speak their language? For Vita Group, the answer was simple: Don’t just translate it; position it to provide a polished performance. Technical Lead at Elementary, Liam Firth and Dawn Williams, Marketing Director for Vita Student, explain how they did it.
“We originally developed the Vita Student site as a multilingual site, but even so, adapting it for the Chinese market presents its own challenges,” says Liam. “For a start, Chinese is a graphic language read right to left with different character spacing from English. We had to account for these differences when introducing translated text.”
Keeping the end user front of mind
“Working closely with the Vita team, who created the original web designs, we made sure the page layouts looked as slick as the English and Spanish language versions. Giving Chinese users a premium experience was always front of mind, reflecting the high-end Vita Student facilities and services.”
Dawn agrees. “An international student’s first interactions with Vita Student can be through the website. A bad digital experience could make them doubt the quality of our physical locations. Translation is critical, but the aim was to take it to another level and avoid it looking like an afterthought due to poor execution. We wanted Chinese students to know they matter to us.”
Managing multilingual translations
Liam continues, “The high-end experience needed to go beyond first impressions. We introduced user-friendly features in the original Vita Student site development (a hybrid solution between standard WordPress and headless React), like real-time room availability, to give students a great experience. Knowing the site needed to be multilingual, we used a headless React app to ensure everything was translatable from the get-go. We also used the Polylang Plugin, but we’ve gone quite far beyond its standard functionality.”
Dawn adds, “The room availability system Liam mentions links to tens of thousands of rooms, and that all needed to be available in Chinese.”
Liam points out that there are other translation benefits for content managers. “There are three language levels to the site: English, Spanish and Chinese. Central management is with the English team, and once approved content is on a template page, it can be translated by the international teams. To simplify things, we’ve introduced automatic translation to areas with regularly occurring features like ‘book your room’ buttons.”
We knew Elementary had the experience to deliver the user and content manager experience we needed. We were confident they’d navigate Chinese-specific requirements, resulting in a high-performing Chinese-facing layer to the site
Dawn Williams, Marketing Director for Vita Student
Introducing compatible Chinese services
“WordPress’s internationalisation features work well for content management in global teams,” explains Liam. “We combined the benefits of a flexible content structure while cutting out repetitive manual work involved in translation. It also made our other challenge straightforward: swapping out Western services like Google for the Chinese equivalent, Baidu, on the Chinese ‘layer’ of the site.”
“Maintaining the site’s performance was also a key concern – connections to the outside world can be slow because of the Chinese internet regulatory system, often called the Great Firewall of China. We partnered with WordPress VIP on hosting to make sure this wasn’t a problem – their content delivery network has globally located edge cache servers that keep the site speed rapid within China.”
“We know this works because we had people in the China team manually check page loading speeds, which we compared to measured web page samples. It gave us a good idea of how long things took to load.”
Dawn says the Elementary Digital team’s ability to ensure first-class performance in China was a deciding factor in their partnership. “We knew Elementary had dealt with multilingual sites before and had the experience to deliver the user and content manager experience we needed. We were confident they’d navigate Chinese-specific requirements, resulting in a high-performing Chinese-facing layer to the site.”
He adds, “The original Chinese site was basic with flat text and no interactivity. It didn’t reflect the first-class service international students get from Vita Student. The site’s new section aligns with the English and Spanish language versions – it’s entirely cohesive.”
Looking to the future
Liam added, “It’s uncommon for a UK agency to deliver a Chinese website, but we’re comfortable developing complex sites, and this was no different. As a WordPress VIP partner, we work with businesses looking for an agency with the experience to consult and advise on growing their digital presence in new international markets.
“Vita Student partnered with us because we have the capability to deliver a solution that’s not just fit for now; its relevance will continue as their business grows.”
Dawn concludes, “Vita Group started as one man’s mission to revolutionise student accommodation in the UK, opening in Liverpool with a total of 68 rooms. Today, we have over 10,000 rooms across the UK and Spain and a range of complementary residential brands. As we continue to redefine the rental market, Elementary’s expertise is central to the success of growing our online presence and maintaining its performance.”
The people that made it possible
Caroline
Liam
Rodger