When 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 (see above).

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.