Chinabites

New Navigation on Restaurant Detail Pages

posted: Jun. 28, 2008

I re-arranged the navigation interface for individual restaurant pages so that readers no longer have to do a page reload to view the menu or map for a restaurant and also conserves a bit more north-south real estate on the page.

Here’s an example from the entry on Hua ...

A breakdown of mobilenative.com

posted: Jun. 27, 2008

Here's a compliment to Mobile Native: I didn't remember that they were a Beijing-based site until I returned to their site after a quick browse a week or so ago. That is to say, it is obvious at a glance that this brand has ambitions beyond Beijing, beyond ...

a breakdown of localnoodles.com

posted: Jun. 25, 2008

I’ve placed the tall, frosty glass of haterade that was my original post on localnoodles.com back in fridge.   Yes, this site is a bit of a knockoff of yelp.com, but there is a pretty interesting case study to be observed here.

It appears that this site started ...

Linking to the competition

posted: Jun. 23, 2008

As I’ve been poking around the internets for sites that compete with chinabites in the “I’m looking for a place to eat in Beijing” market, I’ve been amazed, every day, at the sheer volume of sites up that are trying to do the same thing.  In Business ...

a breakdown of cityweekend.com.cn

posted: Jun. 23, 2008

Cityweekend.com.cn has a relatively up-to-date look and heavy focus on user-generated content.  Site organization tells us a bit about their scope and ambition.  The City Weekend brand is, of course, ready to go international (seeing as everywhere has cities and weekends) and the URL is at least good ...

a breakdown of thebeijinger.com

posted: Jun. 22, 2008

Despite hosting a large and diverse body of editorial content, thebeijinger.com is focused almost exclusively on the classifieds which populate its main page.  My sense is that this classified board is the most popular in its niche in Beijing and is viewed by entrepreneurial Chinese as a good way ...

the state of beijing local websites

posted: Jun. 20, 2008

chinabites.com was conceived as a local site with a twist: a site that introduced a location, Beijing, to foreigners who didn’t speak the local language. Original, right? Actually, no … no its not. There are a plethora of sites that aspire to this crown already, as far as I ...

chinabites past

posted: Jun. 19, 2008

Chinabites.com was first and foremost a site to help me learn a web application framework.  Second, it was my initial foray into what I hoped would become a series of entrepreneurial new media publishing projects.  These projects would be data-driven web sites which eventually would become self-sustaining both in ...

the classic mistake

posted: Jun. 19, 2008

There are already a bunch of really good websites about Beijing that face an English-speaking foreign audience, so why bother making another?  This is the point in a paragraph that I’d tell you why, if I thought it actually was a good idea.  Honestly though, its not really.  The ...