A short history of DalianDalian.com, and why you should build your own
September 17th, 2008 ChrisWhen I arrived in Dalian, most of what I knew about the city came from word of mouth. I’d spent a few months hanging around a local expat forum, reading blogs, emailing people who lived there.
I read up on the city where I could, but coverage of smaller cities in China (even small cities of three to six million) tends take a birds-eye view. I knew about Thomas Friedman’s ongoing love affair with the Northeast’s biggest outsourcing hub, and I knew about the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars. There was more out there, but it was scattered among blogs and forum posts. There were bits on other websites and far more in people’s heads.
When Alex, Rick and I sat down to build DalianDalian, we wanted to pull all those threads together. Our site would be a hub, pulling in and linking out to every piece of information we could find about Dalian and Northeast China.
A few days ago, Thomas Crampton interviewed Alex about the site for his blog and Danwei.org:
In comments, Alex added more on the what went into building the site:
* 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). Doing it again I’d still go with Drupal, the additional modules are now much more mature and while it is pretty administer friendly it offers lots of opportunity to go beneath-the-hood if desired.
* 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 technical 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, it is a work in progress).
In the end, making a website, creating media, is fascinating, at least we think so. If you’re in a 2nd/3rd tier city in China or anywhere in the world that you think under-serves a niche, a little tinkering with technology can get it served; it’s far less ‘making a website’ far more thinking deeply about what is useful and ways to be useful.
Alex’s last point is worth a post in itself. We learned far more about media and community building the site than we did about web development (of which we learned a great deal). Anyone thinking of starting a similar project, do it. If you need help or advice, get in touch.
