Chinabites

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 to get in touch with the broad unwashed masses of foreigners in Beijing.

The best part about The Beijinger’s restaurant directory is its fairly good presentation of the different cuisine types as a horizontal, wrapping list.  Chinabites’ first attempt at listing cuisines vertically along the left hand column was aborted in favor a horizontal approach because the long list of cuisines was scrolling off of the screen.  Also: to my knowledge The Beijinger is the only listing to prominently feature Tanjia cuisine, which will definitely be on my personal to-visit list for my next trip to Beijing.  I confess that the Tanjia restaurant at the Sports University looks fascinating.

The other positive about the restaurant directory is that they provide decent information about each restaurant, whether it has wi-fi, etc.  Excluding these bright spots, there is very little positive to say about the directory or the site in general.  It has a decidedly dated look and feel and is horribly cluttered with unsightly flashing advertisements.  There are no user-generated reviews and no invitation to interact with the listing in any sort of advanced way (such as filtering based on multiple criteria).  If it were not for the popularity of their classified ads section, I kind of doubt I would ever go to this site.

Below I lay out my own semi-structured bullet-point analysis of the thebeijinger.com, I’ll be doing this for the other competing sites in subsequent posts and hopefully at the end I’ll do a summary.

Size of restaurant directory:

• 705 restaurants (best Chinese local food site has 20471 listings

Domain Name:

• 12 chars + .com, fairly easy to type, though maybe not as easy as thatsbj.com
• Brand confined to Beijing

Restaurant URL design:

• Restaurant branch url: http://www.thebeijinger.com/directory/venue/1001-Nights/2
• Fairly human readable

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Notes:

• Googled “kro’s nest pizza beijing”: thebeijinger page was on 2nd results page (behind the competition)
• The <title> tag had both the English and Chinese name of the restaurant.
• The <meta> description tag contained the editorial copy about the restaurant found in the body of the page.
• The <meta> keywords tag contained: “beijing directory listings Restaurants Pizza”
• These are most likely a good subset of the search terms that are being contested here.

Navigation:

• 1 click to get to a search that would return restaurants
• 2 clicks to get the restaurants-only directory
• 2 clicks to get to cuisine directory
• No sub-locale (district / neighborhood) listings

Interactivity:

• Search, without much tolerance for error
• No user reviews
• No user reporting of incorrect / outdated info
• No ability to filter down searches

Maps:

• Some directory listings have maps.
• Outsourcer mobile native is painfully slow.
• Has “nearby venues” function, but was too slow to use.