Fun in the Sandbox

Alpha versions, beta versions, test sites, visits from mom, exercise programs and contest defeats. It has been a busy month here at RightSite, so apologies if the blog was a bit slow lately.

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….

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