Making a Chinese version of our website

Factual Questions
1

About two years ago, we have created a geocities website for my wife’s art. As she is Chinese (with her family still in mainland China), we made a double version, one English, one Chinese. When we were done (great timing), we found out that China has banned access to Geocities. So, although we continued to update the English version, we left the Chinese version as is.

We have now upgraded to our own site (www.lu-art.com), and we have discovered that this one can be seen in China as well. Obviously I would like to update the Chinese part, but whatever we did two years ago to create Chinese text in geocities does not work anymore. I have been given the advice to do this with HTML codes… but I am an abolute HTML analphabete. :frowning:

Anybody here can explain in layman terms how to do this? Any help would be highly appreciated.

I wondered whether to post this in IMHO or here, but I think there should be one factual answer.

2

Looks like the text itself is ok, it’s just that the character set (the written language that the page should be rendered in) is set incorrectly.

I don’t know how much HTML code you have seen, but if you can open the HTML document in a text editor, look for the part near the beginning that says charset=windows-1252, and change windows-1252 to gb2312.

GB-2312 is the common encoding scheme for simplified Chinese. That will tell the browser that if it doesn’t know what language to render in, automatically go with Chinese.

My Chinese reading skills still aren’t very good, but I tried this and noticed several characters that seemed to be in place (i.e. “shui” under several water-related pictures, etc). Hopefully this helps!

3

You need to insert a “lang” attribute for your <html> tag. The valid values are defined by ISO 639.

Example:

<HTML lang=“zh”> (for Chinese webpages).