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DalianDalian Offers To Set Up Free China City Portals
When Alex Bowman arrived in Dalian about 3 years ago, he joined CNET blogger Rick Martin, Chris Amico and a few other Internet-savvy westerners in working to fill the information gap they faced.
Founding DalianDalian, they aimed to help and share news, tips and information about city life for recently arrived expatriates.
The site has developed into a lively community and now they have now decided to offer the platform for free to similar-minded expats living in any city that does not currently have a good city site. (The platform works with any language).
An English-language city magazine was launched in Dalian about 10 months ago, but Bowman does not view them as a competitor. The problem with the magazine is that it operates under an advertising license and faces China’s normal censorship regime.
This runs in contrast to the forums on DalianDalian, where people can say what they really think or find useful.
Anyone need free help setting up a city portal in a second or third-tier city in China (or elsewhere)?
More on the video below:
Discussion
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Cheers Tom,
The video was totally unplanned and unscripted, the software is in a state of flux by if anyone is interested in what we’re doing then please do drop me a line. I was staring like a psycho.
I suppose the main points are:
* Web development has got to the stage where someone with little technical knowledge can create a multi-faceted site.
* Know what you really want to do before starting to do it - that’s really really important in any project, large or small.
* Choose a business model. Do you want to be able to earn an income from the site? In a 2nd or 3rd tier Chinese city this will be hard, almost futile, and will run into many problems related to regulation, receipt issuance, etc. It is possible to do these things on the side, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
* Know the tools available. We started with Drupal because it was really the only (free) thing at the time capable, but needed quite a lot of tweaking, especially modules that were half-finished. Now there are good alternatives, probably Ning is the most well known, but make sure they can do what you really want in the way you want (i.e. have some specifications, as mentioned above).
* Ask someone for help. Drupal is a good community full of free software volunteers happy to give advice. They’re not going to build a site for you for free though they will make it easier. I’m happy to give some advice and tweaks for something similar in nature to DalianDalian.com.
* Stay on the move and be self-critical. What do the members and other contributors say? What don’t you like? This is very much our problem (we like to break the site to see if a touch-up is possible).
In the end, making a website, creating media, is fascinating. If you’re in a 2nd/3rd tier city in China or anywhere in the world that you think under-serves a niche, it can be a fun little project to do with a few friends.
[…] few days ago, Thomas Crampton interviewed Alex about the site for his blog and […]