Foreign Perspectives

For a start, they’re almost all entirely in French. You’re probably thinking, why wouldn’t they be, after all French is the language of France, isn’t it? Well, yes, but the French don’t use the Internet that much so most people looking at the site won’t be French. Last year, the local Chambre of Commerce paid serious cash for a brand new website to attract tourists to the area yet it’s entirely in French when the majority of tourists coming here aren’t French and neither speak nor read French particularly well.

In fact in some cases French sites clearly don’t work and have obviously never been tested. For instance, it’s actually impossible to register for a job interview on the ASSEDIC site if you’ve not had a job before. One reason that we’re registered on very few French listings sites is that few of them actually work; when we looked up one of the local hotels a few years back we found that only one out of about 4 or 5 of the websites that they were listed on worked.

The other thing that’s quite typically French is to have a beautiful website which is totally invisible to google et al because it’s all graphics. For instance, the brand new website for the Sense winebar in Perpignan looks lovely but try turning the graphics off and all you get is the empty screen which is seen by the google bots.

Where there are more sensible developments are with the utilities and banks which generally provide at least a minimalist website in English and you can even phone EDF and France Telecom in English.