I would like to ask, as I owned a small business in Greece and had a website with a .gr-domain, eg. nameofthebusiness.gr. I closed the business since I moved to Germany and I plan to reopen it here. Can I use the same webpage? Or should I get the same business name that I had but now under .de-domain? Or should I translate the whole site in German and add an impressum page?
If you plan to start your business now in Germany your website should follow German law - as you assumed you’d need a German impressum at least.
If you like to address customers living in Germany I’d strongly recommend to register a German DE-domain. All other content decisions depend on your customers. If they feel more comfortable with Greek and you won’t address German speaking persons it would not be necessary to translate the content.
In most cases I suppose there will be German (speaking) customers of a business you own in Germany. So actually I’d prefer to offer information in German.
An easy compromise if you had both Greek and German speaking customers: I’d plan the site with all details in the most important language. Instead of translating everything you could integrate just one page in the other language which offers the most important information on that single page.
Since you own the content of your former business in Greece you may re-use it or parts of it. Because of SEO and the risk of duplicate content I’d suggest to adapt content slightly.
Source: Prof. Dr. Thomas Pleil
Institut für Kommunikation und Medien (ikum)
h_da Hochschule Darmstadt - University of Applied Sciences
June 2017
