Making It Both Ways

Now that we have finished most of the technical aspects of RightSite, it’s time to concentrate on the secret sauce; the magic ingredient that will make RightSite stand out and drive people wild.  We are going to start creating the Chinese version of our site.

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.

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