Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder?

While Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama were busy splitting the votes these past few weeks, our electoral college on www.chinasuccessstories.com was faced with a much easier choice to make. After redesigning our China Business site we asked: what do you think of our new design? Now some say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If there is some truth in that, we are faced with a problem…

Here are the results:

Excellent job: 42%
Nice: 34%
Better than before: 8%
Poor: 3%
Ugly: 14%

Now that is a big – huge! – compliment to the designer, isn’t it? We will make sure to let him know!

The problem, as far as beauty is in the eye of the beholder is concerned, is this. With well over 75% of our visitors liking the looks, we either have:

...an extremely homogenous demographic (with people from all over the world visiting?)
...made an award winning design (we take pride in what we do, but we simply cannot be the world’s most beautiful website; our budget doesn’t allow for it)
...an easy to manipulate poll system (try it yourself on www.chinasuccessstories.com, it is impossible)
...have fans that vote, many others that don’t (actually this is plausible)

So what is it? I’ll go for the last option. Thanking everybody who bothered to express their view!

M

And to the strikingly small minority that sees room for improvement: please tell me what you think www.chinasuccessstories.com needs to do to get you over to the 75% side?

Starting a business in China

"This article is among the most helpful I’ve ever seen if you are considering starting a business." And... "This post ought to be subtitled “The Fantasy Edition” as it has virtually no connection to reality." What are they talking about? And who's right or wrong? You be the judge: http://www.chinasuccessstories.com/2008/01/09/starting-business-china/

Social networking for China Success Stories

Thanks to my activity on LinkedIn, I keep getting introduced for Spock and Plaxo. So I decided to give them both a go. From now on you can meet me here as well:

http://www.spock.com/Michiel-de-Boer-TrrD1uS (check out my 'Spock Power')

On Plaxo I don't know if I have a unique URL yet. But you will find me through the China Business group I started on:

http://china-business.plaxogroups.com/

What I like about Plaxo is the fact that it is easy to import feeds from other platforms. But I do not completely trust them (yet?). What I like about Spock is the simplicity. In both cases, I doubt if they will mean more to my business then LinkedIn has so far.

If you want to connect without using Spock or Plaxo, you can still find me here:

www.xing.com/profile/Michiel_deBoer3
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mmcdeboer

Hope to meet up with you anytime soon!

M

PS Almost forgot, I'm here as well: http://community.globeforum.com/profile/michiel_deboer

China online

Yeeaaah! We did it: we launched the v2.0 of www.chinasuccessstories.com Many thanks to R, N, S, big G and last but not least our Alpha male J. Still a lot of work left though, so I hope to find some China time-off time soon to keep you updated on what works best as far as SEO/SEM is concerned. In terms of content, according to our visitors this is what we need:

China Business Success Stories v2.0 should feature:

A China Wiki: 21%
Chinese culture Q&A: 21%
Business directory: 37%
Chinese Trade Fair calendar: 21%

With one of these four online, hopefully you'll forgive me for keeping this a brief post ;-)

M