Back in August, I wrote about finding my footing in AI’s messy middle, and I ended that post by admitting I was watching where the wind was blowing and getting ready to pivot if necessary. A few people asked me what that pivot might look like. I took my time in figuring it out, and as I prepared for an extended trip to Japan, I realized that the answer had been in front of me the whole time.
Starting now, I’m putting a name to something I’ve quietly been doing for a long time: Taupecat Studios is focusing on multilingual WordPress. When a WordPress site needs to speak more than one language, I want to be the first person people think to call.
Why multilingual?
I’ve loved studying foreign languages since I was a child. It was a way to connect with other cultures that went beyond traveling there; it was a step closer to immersing myself in what made those other cultures “tick.” In high school, I studied both French and Spanish. In college, I took a little bit of Russian. And for my recent trip to Japan, I spent a year learning Japanese so I could say a bit more than just “sumimasen” and “arigatō.”
It also made me think about what it takes to build a website that serves more than one audience at once.
Installing a translation plugin takes about ten minutes. Making a site genuinely work in two languages touches almost everything else: how the content is modeled, how the URLs are built, how search engines know which version to show to whom, whether your fonts even contain the characters you need, what happens to form confirmations and site search, and (my favorite) who on your team updates the Spanish page when someone changes the English one. Most of those questions don’t surface until the week before launch, which is the worst possible week to discover them.
I’ve been answering those questions for a while now. I’ve built WordPress sites in English and Spanish, and one in English and Khmer (which taught me more about fonts than I ever expected to know). My multilingual work actually predates WordPress entirely; I once built an entire CMS that supported a half dozen different languages (I’ll be sharing more about that project soon). And I just spent most of October in Japan, on the other side of the screen, trying to read websites with my very-much-in-progress Japanese. Nothing builds empathy for your non-native-speaking visitors quite like watching Google Translate fail at a site where most of the “words” are actually graphics.
What’s not changing
Having a specialty doesn’t mean that I’m turning away single-language projects. I’m still taking on, and still enjoy, the work I’ve been doing for nearly ten years:
- General WordPress builds. If a monolingual WordPress site is what you need, I’m still here for you.
- Care + Hosting plans. Same plans, same terms, same person keeping an eye on your site.
- Agency partnerships. If we already work together, keep sending the work you’ve been sending.
- The small stuff. Plugin conflicts, a broken header, a page that needs adding by Friday. Still here for that.
Here’s how I think about it: if I can get WordPress to behave in multiple languages and writing systems, your single-language site is in very good hands.
If you’re an agency
When a client asks, halfway through discovery, “Oh, can it also be in French?”, you don’t have to guess at the scope or hope a plugin covers it. Bring me in early, and I’ll help you price it honestly and build it properly. White-label is fine; your client never needs to know my name.
And when the project is a perfectly ordinary, single-language WordPress site? Send that too. More on how I work with agencies here.
What’s next
Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the nuts and bolts of multilingual WordPress: the decisions that are expensive to change later, the plugin choices, and the things that quietly break when a second language shows up. If you’d like those in your inbox, sign up for the newsletter.
And if you have a site that needs to speak more than one language (or you know someone who does), let’s talk. On parle WordPress. Se habla WordPress. WordPressが話せます。
I’m working on the rest.
AI was used to revise drafts of this post.