weninchina Site Blog

Back in action

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:12:49 -0500

Well, it has been quite some time since I’ve posted new articles, but I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime at my job and at home, it’s been the never-ending winter. We managed to get to Hong Kong over Thanksgiving week, however, and those experiences will be coming through in the next several articles. Today, we’re adding “Dealing with Heat & Humidity,” “Dealing with Cold & Damp,” “Sandstorms,” “Saying No,” and “Jiaozi.”

Write what you know, they say

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:32:42 -0500

After finishing the Chinese New Year article and updating the Planning Transpacific Flights page, a light bulb turned on in my head. Why haven’t I written about the airports families will be traveling through on their China trips on the North American side of the Pacific?

Seems kind of obvious, but there’s less out there than I had thought. Well, that’s another 15 or so articles to write, but I’m an airline geek, so I’ll enjoy every minute. As it happens, I’m on a couple of flights this weekend that take me through one of my favorite airports, Seattle-Tacoma, so I’ve packed an extra battery and memory card - time for some photography!

December was “Engineering Month”

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:41:47 -0600

With tonight’s upload, I’ll have completed a total redesign of every page on the site that I started in mid-November. Not only do we have a new logo (and business cards, stationery template, etc.), but the pages are now ready to handle multimedia content such as YouTube videos. There are more article-to-article links, as well as reviewed & refreshed links to outside resources, and some articles have been updated as well (“Transpacific Flights” in particular is almost entirely re-written.) I’ve been getting to bed after midnight pretty much the entire month, so it’ll be nice to simply concentrate on creating new content and getting the word out about the site.

Google rankings for various search phrases have really improved, and now that I’ve found how to give readers the ability to “tag” weninchina content to their own social networks, I’m seeing fresh traffic from that angle too. Should be seeing our 1,100th visitor before year’s end!

There’s always something underway here; many more articles for the next quarter, a new press outreach project, and some dabbling in video for starters. Stay tuned!

Getting back in the groove

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:26:44 -0600

Three big new articles going up tonight that travelers are going to get a lot of use from: Tips on Tipping, Essential Mandarin Phrases, and Characters You’ll Get to Know. We certainly could’ve used all of these resources on our adoption trip! This brings the article count to 55 - on our way to 85-90...

The other exciting development is that I’m rolling out a graphic update across the website, including a new logo (above). Articles will have a little more breathing room for the text, and enough space to embed a YouTube video at the top of the page, if that’s what we want to use for an illustration. We’re also working to trim the filesize of images, which should help with Internet Explorer users, and adding a “printer friendly” PDF link to pages to make it easier to access the content.

The changes will take some time to deploy across all the pages, but I figured I should start now before the project becomes impossibly large! Plus, now I have a consistent template to use for all new articles. (And a steady go-to project for the upcoming winter.)

Thanks for reading, and please be sure to spread the word about us!

Much too long

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:55:44 -0500

The hiatus between articles was longer than I wanted, and even though I posted four new pages this week, it’s better for both you the reader and me the publisher to update in smaller but steadier chunks.
Distractions? Yes. Realities of family life? Yes. A couple of very nice vacations? Yes. Burning hard at work during the day with just enough left for a few hours of family time - once my daughter has gone to sleep, my brain flames out. Ah, that’s it.
Well, that’s not how this site is going to prosper, or how I’m going to hit the creative and financial goals I’ve drawn out for weninchina. So I’ve got to be more efficient at the writing and editing process.
The upcoming Mandarin Phrases downloadable cheat sheet looks like it is going to be pretty cool; that’s what I’ll be concentrating on in the next couple weeks.
There’s always the “next step” temptation with a big project like this ... over the summer I’ve created a new logo and graphic treatment, for instance. Have been investigating print-on-demand options for a “best of” handbook. Sent emails out to travel agencies asking them to help spread the word. Etc. All important too, but they don’t get the next article published...
Still, I can’t wait to deploy the new site design, even though it is going to be a total pain to re-craft every page...