Plenty of Bangladeshi sites are built as English sites with Bengali poured in. They work, roughly. They also look subtly wrong to every reader, in ways that are hard to name and easy to feel.
Type is the first problem
Bengali script carries conjuncts, matras above and below the baseline, and a taller effective line height than Latin text. A font stack tuned for English produces cramped lines and clipped marks. Line height and letter spacing need setting for Bengali specifically, not inherited from a Latin default.
Font weight is the second trap. Many Bengali webfonts ship two or three real weights and the browser fakes the rest. Synthesised bold on conjunct characters is visibly poor. Use the weights the font actually contains.
Numerals need a decision
Bengali numerals or Western digits is a choice you should make deliberately and then apply everywhere. Mixing them — Bengali in body copy, Western in prices and pagination — is the most common tell that a template was adapted rather than designed.
Search has to be forgiving
Readers type Bengali in several ways: phonetic keyboards, fixed layouts, and sometimes transliterated Latin. Exact string matching fails a large share of real queries. Normalisation and tolerant matching are not enhancements here; they are the difference between a catalogue that can be searched and one that cannot.
The small things that add up
- Set the lang attribute correctly so browsers select the right font and hyphenation behaviour
- Check line breaking on long conjunct words at phone width
- Test form validation messages in Bengali — they are usually the last strings anyone translates
- Confirm your database and connection are genuinely UTF-8 end to end before launch, not after
None of this is difficult. It is simply skipped when Bengali is treated as a translation layer instead of as the language the site is written in.
- Design
- Bangladesh