Fall Creek Farm & Nursery: Centralized Multilingual Website 

The Overall Problem

Fall Creek Farm & Nursery began growing and distributing blueberries in Lowell, OR about 40 years ago and are now a leading grower all over the world. Because blueberries take nearly 10 years to grow and were primarily only able to grow in Southern Canada, Fall Creek Farm & Nursery has been breeding blueberries since the early 1990’s to allow blueberry farms to flourish all over the world. The company has been able to serve customers and others within the industry from Africa to Europe, and all throughout the Americas. Fall Creek grows the plants that produce 98% of the blueberries in the US, and they're expanding globally and with this expansion they needed to cater to people internationally as well.

Because their brand had grown significantly globally, they needed to support an online network for all the regions they worked within. This meant their site needed to conform to the nations they worked with- it needed to showcase their message and brand in a way that was translatable to everyone. They needed a centralized multilingual website and that’s where GRAYBOX came in the picture.

Our Solution

1. Collecting Data Requirements

GRAYBOX first worked with Fall Creek Farm to Identify which pages were supposed appear on the multilingual site(s). This gave GRAYBOX better insight as to what pages could be translated and what had to be made new because the default language was English for all the pages.

2. Technical Architecture

GRAYBOX then had decide how to accomplish the given criteria. They had to configure the translation plugin that was chosen, and determine how the varieties and product data are connected by region. It was essentially better understanding how the website was organized and connected, and the process of copying over all of the pages without having to manually create them by hand.

Adding a new language to the system required the following steps:
The languages had to be defined in Transcribe, with the inclusion of a 2-character ISO abbreviation for the given language. Every URL in the system had too be directed to the target language by prepending the short code in the URL.
The replacement variables were then defined and updated for the new languages.
Content entries were added for each piece of content required for the new language.

3. Testing & Troubleshooting

A language switching utility was placed on each page, and it switches the visitor’s viewing language for their session- the visitor can only view the navigation and content associated with the target language at any given time. Beyond implementation of the language switching utility and these certain translation plugins, GRAYBOX found that there were missing pieces to the multi-language pages. Some titles, form fields, and data weren’t being accepted and required manual work. GRAYBOX found the code necessary and came up with the logic to force the server to deliver the correct data to the front end of the website. Alongside all this, GRAYBOX implemented automated test scripts for each page command.