[theforum] a few comments about Chinese web design / development community

Zhang Weiwu zhangweiwu at realss.com
Sun Dec 7 05:34:48 CST 2008


Hello. First my introduction. My name is Zhang Weiwu, currently running a web-based solution company in Beijing mostly working for western customers. I started my career from a web developer. Erika from evolt.org asked me to post some comments on having a community also with non-English speaker.


If you are considering having non-English community, I recommend you
split them into 2 categorizes, the community that use English as second
language (e.g. HongKong) and the community that doesn't use English
(mainland China). I don't know much about HongKong, but for mainland
China users, having a forum is far from enough. A whole Chinese website,
Chinese interface and Chinese online magazine is needed, mixed with some
Chinese web design culture, e.g. in workshops I heard in China SEO is
done by having as many links as possible on each single page, not sure
if it's true because I am not a specialist in SEO. However I think now
is the right time to attract mainland Chinese web develops and web
designers because they are now getting in touch with XHTML, CSS and Web
2.0 (a few years later then in the west) and some of them are eager to
knowledge and have bunch of questions that local forum couldn't answer

(thus they don't bother to ask). Also China mainland might be the place
that produce more than half of the world's web pages. It's a large
community.


There are also a lot of difference in web design in mainland China then
in the west, too much to detail in one email. e.g. more columns are
allowed (because Chinese ideograph can line-wrap at 13th ideograph,

narrower than English text), price is by project instead of by hour etc.
So for these community: 1) I think being friendly to non-English is not
enough. 2) it helps a lot who run the community be familiar with the
local market.

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