For those of you who are newcomers to this blog, RightSite.asia is the industrial real estate website operated by my company, RightSite. We are an online B2B platform for owners and occupiers to exchange information and arrange deals, as well as providing resources for facilitating real estate transactions.  But mostly we have listings.  Lots of listings. And this translates into a big site.

Big site in terms of lots of information.  RightSite now has more than 2700 detailed property listings, as well as listings of nearly 2000 industrial parks and economic zones all over China.  Put together, all of this information makes for a very large site. As of the latest count, RightSite had nearly 40,000 database nodes and the actual size of the database was more than 1 GB.

So does that make RightSite the biggest Drupal site in the world? I can find any data on this at this point.  But I would be willing to wager that we are still the biggest Drupal site in China.  And China is not a small place.

So does RightSite being big help you at all?  Not directly.  But by filling RightSite with this much data, we hope that we have established an important resource base for facilitating industrial real estate transactions. Now we are relying on the members of our community to keep contributing so that the site continues to support economic growth and industrial development across China.

Related posts:

1. Web Development in an International World
2. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
3. RightSite Marches On

Better in beta, but not as good as it will get

Hi Gang! I’ve been absent from Mingtiandi again, but this time it’s been for a good reason – because we’ve been working all hours to launch RightSite.Asia into public beta. We were in private beta for a few months, madly chasing out the bugs and adding content to the site to make it ready for public viewing.  Consider this a big shout-out to all the people who helped us test the site and contributed their ideas.

During the last two months we have been able to accomplish some major tasks that make this public beta version of RightSite a huge improvement over the private beta. F’rinstance…

• Added more than 200 factories warehouses and other facilities to our directory
• Dug up another 40 industrial zones to complement the 1,500 already in the directory
• Created some groovy in-house advertising with the help of Paper Stone Scissors
• Added a directory of Shanghai’s industrial property agents
• Made sure the (*&^%$#@! site works right

Besides working on the site, we have been very busy the last month with building our team.  We are currently hiring interns for a few different areas, a content manager, and a marketing person. Overall, the response to our job advertisements has been very encouraging.  While the economic crisis makes it hard to earn money, it certainly makes it much easier to hire staff. I have been recruiting people off and on for the last six years in Shanghai , so I thought I would share a few notes about this year’s process and how it compares to prior years.

• Application volume — we are getting a much large volume of applicants than previous years. (duh)
• Big companies — a disproportionate number of the applicants are coming from big multinational companies.  Is it because these companies have tbe most experience in managing a downturn (and the local companies will catch up later) or is it just that the mutinationals steered themselves into a mess and now are bailing as fast as they can?
• Marketing — out of the positions that we are hiring for, Marketing Executive is by far the most applied for.  Are companies cutting their marketing staff more than other departments
• Hallucinogen use — we have received applications from a number of folks who have run through three or four jobs in the last two years but still want prime salaries. I thought downturns were when reality was supposed to set in?

But the biggest difference in hiring new team members this year is that we can do so at a sane pace.  One of the key indicators that it was time to sell my previous company when I did so back in 2007 was the challenges of recruiting. During 2006 and 2007 in Shanghai, companies recruiting staff were forced to accelerate and simplify their recruitment processes to ensure that they had a chance at the best candidates.  Quite simply, if companies did not take the first chance they had to hire someone, or agree to overpay, then they would have trouble hiring candidates.

That’s no way to run a business.

So in 2009, it seems that a bit of normalcy has returned to the market.  The numbers of truly desperate applicants are still fairly low — it’s more that the pace of hiring has returned to what it would be during the good times in the US or Europe.

With the recruitment opportunities available, and our sexy new beta site, RightSite should be able to rapidly establish itself as a productive forum for the industrial property community. Hope you will stop by the site and let us know what you think.

Related posts:

1. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
2. The Resume Shuffle
3. Advice On Getting Hired in China

8 is far out!

This is a special kind of post that I haven’t done before — a thank you post.

I’m writing today to express my appreciation for all of you that have helped to make Mingtiandi.com what it is today — #8.  Let me explain.  After less than eleven months of publishing this blog, Mingtiandi.com is now occupies the #9 position on Google, and the #7 position on Yahoo for the keywords “China industrial property.”

What this means is that if you are interested in this industry but don’t know where to find information, when doing a search for China industrial property you will first find a few multi-zillion dollar B2B sites before making your way a few steps down the page to Mingtiandi.com.  (Which is funded by a $80/year hosting package, some free software and a strange sense of humour).  Needless to say, we are pleased.

But it’s all because of you. The many of you have subscribed to the site or recommended us to friends have helped us to climb our way up the rankings.  And we will do our best to continue bringing you an inside perspective on starting media projects in China and all the excitement that is the world of online industrial property media.

We hope you will keep enjoying the site, and we look forward to seeing you next time, right here on Mingtiandi.

Related posts:

1. IHMCFF
2. Serial Entrepreblogger

Beta Ray Bill is not part of the Private Beta

This week marks a big event in China’s industrial property history (or at least a big event for us) — the launch of RightSite’s private beta.

It only took about eight months of development, but the site is now fully functioning and ready for use.  However, just to be sure, we will be restricting the use of the site to invited users (thus the private part of private beta) until February 5th. Although this does restrict most people from using the site right away, this is not that much of a loss to us or our users since the site is basically empty of content right now.

We will be using this private beta period to accomplish a number of goals

Build up listings — we already have a database of 1500 industrial zones that we will be importing this week, but a property site needs actual property listings – individual factories, warehouses and other facilities.  We expect to be able to build up a list of at least 1000 such properties between now and December 31st.

Create community content — RightSite has an extensive community section which provides users with third-party research reports, instructional articles on conducting property transactions in China, a user-generated forum, and a tradeshow calendar. But right now, we just have the framework for all this and need to actually get content into this.  Most of the research reports and articles will come from third parties so we don’t have to write them ourselves, but we still expect this section of the site to take around 30 days to fill up.

Bug testing — Although we have extensively tested the site, there are always a few things that slip through, so we will be watching for bugs, glitches and other annoyances before we open up the site to large scale traffic.

So once we have our data industrial zone data imported this week, we will start the process of inviting selected individuals to try out the site.  If you would like an invite, just leave a comment here on Mingtiandi.

Related posts:

1. Event Marketing at RightSite
2. It’s Beta, Baby!
3. Fun in the Sandbox

We are back online

We are back online here at Mingtiandi, and after eight months of site building and eleven months of company constructing, our new site, www.Rightsite.asia is nearly ready.  Here’s the latest.

Hosting Migration

We have been struggling with migrating this blog, our IDAAWorld.org site, and our email to a new host this week.  These are supposed to be routine processes, but due to my being something of a techno-dunce, and also due to the fact that things often don’t happen quite the way they are supposed to, it has taken a lot more time than expected to complete this migration.

But now you are looking at the same old Mingtiandi.com on a new host, Media Temple.  Everything seems to work, and the site seems a bit faster, so apart from a few dents in my skull from banging my head against the wall, life is pretty good.

RightSite Migration

At the same time that I have been moving the blog, our development team in India has been migrating our site to the same new host as Mingtiandi.com.  This has meant making sure that all elements of the new host are aligned and adjusted the same way as our development platform, and this has meant a few support emails to the hosting company for explanations, instructions and just plain assistance.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we are using Media Temple’s Gridserver hosting, and this seems to be working well for us so far. Here are the good and bad points if you may be considering this hosting product:

Advantages:

• Price — at $20/month it’s pretty cheap
• Dependability — As a cloud-based platform there is a lot of redundancy built in, so it should be reliable
• GUI Interface — We techno-phobes appreciate a control panel with pretty pictures and stuff to click on.  command line interfaces bring back very foggy memories of working at a dumb terminal trying to get a pdp 11/70 mainframe to spit out my freshman year term papers
• Scalability — Media Temple offers a very wide variety of services, so if we outgrow our current package, it should be fairly easy to upgrade
• Speed — even in China, the access times for this US-based service seem pretty ok (but we will see how things go once we actually populate the site with data)
• Knowledgeable support — the email support function has provided knowledgeable answers to some complex questions in a way that dummies like me can understand

Disadvantages:

• Limited root access — the GUI interface limits admin level tasks to the server administrator.  This means if I want someone to install or edit something on the site, other than text, then I end up giving our my server admin id – OUCH!
• No sudo access — although it runs on a Linux platform, the gridserver lacks the all important sudo — this means that our ability to perform admin functions is fairly limited
• Support speed – support replies can take 2-9 hours by email

Site Outlook

We are hoping to launch the private beta of RightSite.Asia on Monday, December 1.  Here’s what has to happen before then.

• Migration clean-up – there are few items that broken during the move, so it will take a couple of days to fix all of these
• Data import – our team spent months building a directory of more than 1,500 industrial zones across China. Now it’s time to import all that information into its new home on RightSite.
• DNS redirect – we will redirect our domain nameservers from our old temporary site to the new site on the new host.  And then it’s showtime!

Related posts:

1. IDAA Online
2. We’re #8!

Chinese proofreading: we are still revising and proofreading the Chinese version of the site

Value lists: we have fixed the problem of arranging the values in our field menus in a natural order for each language (hooray).  But there are still a few English values lurking illicitly in the Chinese site

Style sheet: there are a few changes to be made in font colors and link colors in the site to make it more appealing to users

Property Requirements Location Preferences:  Our team had set up the fields for preferred location in the properties wanted section in the same way that they had set up the location fields in the properties available section.  Oops! We didn’t think that the actual locations wanted would be much more a general than the locations available, so now we need to re-structure these fields.

Linking Industrial Zones to their Subzones: Many large industrial zones include specialised subzones, such as Export Processing Zones, so we need to show the relationships between these zones.  Unfortunately, the existing structure only allowed for free text entry of subzone names. Now we are improving this to allow users to select a parent zone for any subzone from an auto-complete list of existing zones.

Browser Compatibility: There are many different software platforms out there to view RightSite on.  We are trying to make sure our site displays and functions properly on Windows, Mac and Linux, not to mention using Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.  This will take some time.

Loading the Site onto our Permanent Host:  Once we have finished the site, it needs to get set up on our permanent host.

Importing the Data: We have built listings of nearly 1,500 industrial zones, and we will need to import this information into RightSite.

With some luck, I believe that we can be installing RIghtSite onto its permanent webhost on the weekend of 22-23 November.  (Now that’s something to be thankful for). After the site is set up, we will import the data, and do some additional testing.

Look for a live, public beta version of RightSite on December 1st. We hope you will enjoy!

Related posts:

1. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
2. In the Home Stretch
3. Pre-Flight Checklist

Except for one small problem.

This business of making things bilingual is more complicated than we realised. We are using a popular CMS (Content Management System) named Drupal to develop our site, and Drupal has a ready-made module called i18N that provides a structure for building a multi-lingual site. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

The challenge that we are facing is related to the way that the i18N internationalisatin module works. The module provides a framework for translating site content and displaying the content in separate but parallel versions of the site — one for each language.  However, for our site we only need to translate part of the site — our listings of industrial facilities, industrial zones and other information are all structured in such a way that translation is not necessary.  And we have no interest in maintaining a parallel set of listings for each language that we present the site in.  (We hope to someday add traditional Chinese versions of the site, as well as Japanese and Vietnamese versions).  However, we need the translation features of i18n for all other sections of the site.

Unfortunately, building a site that presents different types of content from different workflows in the same page is a bit challenging.  And my development team decided that it would be much easier for them to just run the entire site through the i18N module. “Sure, that makes a bit more work for the customer service team as they have to manually translate a few hundred listings a day, but what that’s their job, right?”

See what happens when teams don’t communicate?

So now the big bad boss — that’s me has had to give the development team the sad news that their plan (and the current product) is not acceptable.  The team now needs to revise our theme so that it can present listing information that is not processed through the i18N translation module, together with the content that has been processed through i18N, in the right language in both the English and Chinese versions of the site.

Hopefully this won’t cause any significant delays to the site, but it certainly won’t be easy.  Then again, given the current economic outlook in China (and around the world), there is not much reason to hurry.

In any case, I need to get back to learning a bit more about web design and development, otherwise I won’t know what not to accept.

Hope you’re having a happy week!

Related posts:

1. Is RightSite the Biggest Drupal Site in the World?
2. Building Our Own International Community
3. Making It Both Ways

We have been busy the last few weeks fixing a few last technical glitches on the project and plowing through the translation. (I never realised that I had built such a complicated website until I had to make an entire second version of it in a language that I can’t read and link the two sites together into a single workflow).  But we are nearly done.

As of today, our project schedule looks like this:

Week of 13 October

• Finish final technical issues (mostly related to content translation workflow and localisation)
• Finalise hosting requirements for the site
• Complete the site translation process

Week of 20 October

• Proofread the Chinese content
• Resolve remaining browser compatibility issues
• Arrange web hosting

Week of 27 October

• Get site installed onto its new host and make it available at its URL

Week of 3 November

• User Acceptance Testing (this is our final chance to make sure it works before we pay the developers)

Ok, so this seems like a lot of steps, but considering that we have been working on the development of this site since April 2nd, we are feeling pretty good right now.  Tired, but good.

To give you a little preview of what to expect, I am attaching screenshots of the site as it currently appears, in both Chinese and English.

Related posts:

1. Still a Few Bugs in the System
2. Building Our Own International Community

As a B2B site in China, we believe that one of the key elements of Rightsite’s effectiveness for its users will be its ability to connect international users from around the world with Chinese property owners.  And since most of our users will not be bilingual in English and Chinese (I wish I was) then our site will need to offer its information in both Chinese and English.  All of the information. Completely the same. Whether the user is viewing in Chinese or English.

Having formerly been a manager at Global Sources, which then was the leading online B2B in Asia, I believe that one of the biggest reasons that Alibaba was able to grow so much more effectively in the same space as Global Sources is that they offered Chinese language service and a complete Chinese site.  This allowed them to gain much greater traction with Chinese Internet users, and since in China the Chinese Internet users are the revenue base, then this is where the money is.  So RightSite will be biingual, just like Alibaba.

Actually, RightSite will be bilingual in a way that is much better than Alibaba. Instead of offering two separate sites (with separate content), one in English and the other in Chinese, RightSite will have only one site with one set of content, but allow the user to choose whether they view the content in Chinese or English.  If we grow a bit, we will also offer versions of the site in traditional Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai. It sounds complicated, but its fairly easy for us to accomplish once the site is done.

RightSite can be easily displayed in various languages because we’ve built the site’s core content, its property listings, consultant listings and industrial zone listings all around structured data.  So if you wanted to create a listing for a warehouse that you would like to sell in Waigaoqiao, rather than just entering a text description of the warehouse into the site in English and/or Chinese, you would be asked to select values in a number of fields for such variables as the area of the warehouse site, the construction area of the warehouse, the province, city and district that the warehouse are in, and many more.

Filling in these values takes about five minutes for a listing, and the user can choose to enter the values from an English or a Chinese interface.  Once the values are entered, however, other users can view the listing (and the values that it contains) in either English or Chinese, regardless of the language that you used to create the listing.

That’s the secret sauce.

Of course, this system applies only to the site’s dynamic content, such as the property listings, and doesn’t work for static content such as field labels, About Us pages and other fun stuff.  For these areas, our team needs to create bilingual versions of all content, and all the static content needs to be entered into the system twice — once in Chinese and once in English.

So that’s where we are right now.  The English static content is 99% complete, but now we will have to add all of the Chinese static content.  This is bit complicated because I can’t read Chinese and neither can any of our developers, so there will be some busy times ahead for the bilingual staff at RightSite. But the hard work of our team should help our site reach users across China and the world.  So let’s get to work.

Related posts:

1. Building Our Own International Community
2. Web Development in an International World
3. Fun in the Sandbox

The big news on this Monday is the debut of the RightSite.Asia sandbox site. (Apologies for the tech-talk – I will do my best to explain, and it’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds).

The key to success for any site is usually its search ranking on search engines such as Google and Baidu. Unfortunately, when new sites are launched, Google likes to put sites into the sandbox before they are allowed to rise and fall in the rankings as they may otherwise deserve.

We are now about 45 days away from the launch of RightSite’s public beta version and to help make sure that the full-on, official, world-beating RightSite.Asia gets to climb out of the sandbox as soon as possible, we have put together this sandbox site as a place-holder until we can get the real site ready. At present the site only contains a brief description of the company and a few other details, no property listings or anything else that will make up the primary content of the real site.

As for the development of RightSite, for you geekier folks who are familiar with the usual software release cycle, we are wandering around the alpha stage somewhere right now. We have completed the basic structure including the ability to post property listings, create company IDs, and conduct basic searches. We expect to complete the advanced search by the end of this week.

Our next steps will be to create the Community section of the site, along with the About Us section. Since most of this is static pages (these are simpler than dynamic pages), we should be able to complete this in the next two weeks or so.

Finally, we will insert all of the Chinese content, including static content and field labels, and our little bilingual site will be ready for full-scale testing. We expect that to happen on about Sept 23rd.

Once we have done our internal (UAT) testing, we will be ready for a public beta. That’s when you folks out there will be able to use all functions of RightSite and let us know what you think. After about six months of working out the bugs, we should be able to take the training wheels off and have a fully operational site. In that six month period we will also be hard at work creating new and more powerful features that will make it easier for people to buy and sell industrial property through out site.

So that’s what I’ve been up to since you saw me last here on Mingtiandi.com. In the meantime, we also were cruelly dinged from the Smith School of Business contest. I guess they didn’t see how sexy industrial property could be. Also, mom stopped by for a brief visit. (Yes, even entrepreneurs have moms).

But the real reason for the blog hiatus has been the exercise program. For the last three weeks I’ve been in the gym each morning at 6:00 am. It was painful at first, but it was about time to do something about that middle-aged spread that comes with the all-in-one house/office lifestyle. You don’t work off much beer walking from the bed to the desk.

Have already lowered my resting pulse from 84 beats/minute to 76 beats/minute and lost a few pounds. Just about six more months of this and I should be back in the shape I was in before I launched my first company in Shanghai. Sigh….

Related posts:

1. It’s Beta, Baby!
2. Hurdling Through China
3. In the Home Stretch