A basic walkthrough to avoid having problems with "funny characters" on your website.
Why think about multilingualism? Most developers bring up this question when asked about their websites. The common problem is that you do not matter about that stuff until someone fills in your comment form and his name suddenly displays funny characters (question marks, squares or other funny characters) in between. Now you have to think about it!
The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.