The Internet has no country boundaries. Customers can access websites from anywhere in the world, at any time, or on any date. Unless you want to lock your customers into using a single language, such as English, to access your site, you should consider globalization issues.

One reason to globalize your applications is to avoid errors and confusion for your customers. For example, a date in the form 1/2/2003 is interpreted as January 2, 2003 in the United States, but as February 1, 2003 in European countries.

Another reason to globalize your applications is to display currencies in the correct format. Think of how your customers would feel when they find out the correct price for an item is 15,000 American dollars, not 15,000 Mexican pesos (about 1600 American dollars).

Your website can also accept customer feedback or some other form of text input. You might want to support that feedback in multiple languages using a variety of character sets.