I’m looking for forums like Sitepoint where I can participate with a french community. The goal is simple: my business is primarily in Quebec and most of my clients speak french so my website is entirely in french. While I love participating on Sitepoint I find that I’m lacking when it comes to presence in a french speaking community.
What I have found so far seems pretty limited so I was wondering if you guys had any other places I could check. I see today that while it’s very helpful to be present in the english speaking world it does very little to help my business.
I truly don’t know any French sites dedicated to web development but I’m sure that if you do a Google search there will be a few. I fail to see what difference would it make to participate in a French forum instead of an English one (except for the fact that speaking your native language is always easier).
If you participate in a forum only for presence (and I understand it as promotion in the sense that you want to expose yourself as an expert) you’ll be doing yourself no favour. It is simply not worth it. While you can create trust in the community with your participation, the number of clicks that you can get, and the interest that you may rise, is limited. And the number of backlinks as well as their value is nill.
It’s actually more about connecting to french speaking developers, writers, etc… Which becomes essential when dealing with clients (the web is about content after all and I think that going native as far as the language goes should help getting the projects I tackle done with a much better quality for the client). I cannot always go about translating back and forth between people. There is just too much that gets lost in the translation and it takes (in my book) too much time.
Sadly I’m having very disappointing results with Google… I mean, I’ve found sites but nothing to the level of quality I have found on Sitepoint. I usually have no problem finding what I need with Google.
I might just have to resort back to the old “connecting in the real world” method
Have you tried networking using LinkedIn or similar? Maybe that could be a way to get to know developers and designers.
It is hard to find anything like SitePoint. There are few that are better, of course (in English) but most are of less quality.
I guess that it is also because English is a much international language. There a few ones in Spanish but I guess that’s because of the number of countries that use that language.
If there’s nothing of high quality in French, you may even want to considere if there’s a real need for this type of forum and create one yourself.
[FONT=verdana]I just went to Google.fr and searched for forum des développeurs web. I found several likely looking forums in the first pages of the results. For example, Developpez.com bills itself as a Forum des professionnels en informatique, and has sections on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SEO, and all the other obvious topics. That was the only one I looked at, but there were dozens more listed.
I’m sure you’ll find what you want if you follow that route.
