Next.js development for Vancouver businesses facing two markets

Vancouver is two markets in one city, and the second one changes a front end in ways most Canadian web work never has to consider.

A large share of the local audience reads Chinese or Korean, not as a diaspora afterthought but as a primary market a business is deliberately selling into. For a Vancouver property firm, retailer, clinic or professional practice, a second writing system is frequently where the growth is.

A CJK font is not a Latin font with more characters

This is the technical consequence that catches teams out, and it arrives as a performance regression rather than as a rendering problem.

A Latin web font covering everything a site needs is a few tens of kilobytes. A font covering the Chinese characters that appear on a real website is measured in megabytes, because the character set is enormous and there is no small subset that covers ordinary prose. Loaded naively, it is the single largest asset on the page by a wide margin.

There are two good answers and they are not exclusive. Subset the font to the characters the site actually contains, which for a site of fixed content is a dramatic reduction, and split what remains into unicode ranges so the browser fetches only the parts it needs. Or prefer the system font, because every major platform ships a competent CJK face and the transfer cost becomes zero.

The second option is better than its reputation. For content-heavy pages the typographic difference between platforms matters far less than several megabytes, and how font and image loading decide the largest paint is the measurement that settles the argument.

Layout assumptions that only break in the other language

Two smaller things reliably break on a first CJK version, and both are invisible until somebody looks at the page.

Text can wrap between characters rather than between words, so a layout tuned around English word lengths behaves differently - headings that were two lines become one, buttons that fitted overflow, and a truncation rule written for Latin text cuts a character in a way that changes meaning.

And a form input in a Vancouver application has to tolerate an input method. Somebody composing a Chinese character produces a sequence of intermediate states, and a field that validates or reacts on every keystroke will interfere with composition. The fix is to respond to composition events rather than to raw input, and it takes an afternoon once somebody knows.

One site, with the regional variant declared

The structural question is whether the Chinese version is a separate property, and the answer is no.

It is the same site with a declared alternate, and the detail that matters is the regional distinction. Traditional and Simplified are different written forms serving different audiences, and declaring them as one language throws away the thing that makes the Vancouver version right for Vancouver. How hreflang and alternates actually work covers the mechanism; the decision is to be specific rather than generic.

Commercially

Scope fixed in writing before work starts, priced per project. The country-level ground - federal and provincial privacy law, French-language obligations, invoicing in Canadian dollars - is on the Canada market page.

Invoiced by Codefacture Yazılım A.Ş. in Türkiye, in Canadian or US dollars by bank transfer, with no Turkish VAT because exported services are exempt.