To achieve the intended practicality is the primary purpose of building a website. Of all the clients that once consulted me about their website designs, 90% is asking for a slick, simple interface. Except for gaming and architecture industries where creativity needs to be put in the very front-line, the major objective for putting together a website of other businesses are unanimously practical – they want their potential customers to come, and find the useful information. A couple of defects that come along with the flash nature contribute most to the overall viewing impediment.

a, It takes way too much time to load. This is one of the important disadvantages of using Flash intros on your web site. There would definitely be images (raster graphics). This increases the file size of the .swf file which in turn increases the total time taken for the homepage to load fully. A greater offence, is embedded graphics and images that are not optimized or publishing the Flash movie with the lowest compression for images. Expecting the visitor to first wait while the Flash intro loads and then expecting them to read your animated sales pitches – well, that’s too much of expectation from your time conscious visitors. The question you need to ask is, would you wait for a Flash intro to load on a web site and would you indeed go through text and be enthralled by the images in the intro? I don’t think so!

b, No good to marketing in SEO terms. Imagine the sole purpose of you building a website is to assist your marketing campaigns while your fancy flash website doesn’t help you at all to improve your search engine ranking (SER). As you know, search engines cannot index images and graphics, but with Flash, they cannot even properly index the text embedded in the movie – The text that you so carefully and painstakingly animated is of no use to the search engine. If you think this problem can be overcome by putting keywords in the META tags or inside HTML comment tags (a search engine spamming tactic)… you are wrong. Google.com which is now the preferred search engine on the web has difficulty in indexing text and cannot follow the links created in Flash movies.

c, Compatibility issues with mobile devices. Since the introduction of Iphone, ipad, and the mobile network that comes along, webpages are being opened on these mobile devices in a staggering fashion. But why Apple products, for example, do not support flash websites? First and foremost, it is clear that Steve Jobs isn’t a fan of Flash websites.  Steve Jobs has publicly issued statements saying that he isn’t fond of the technology and that it is “buggy.” Steve Jobs also puts Flash down because he says that it uses up too much computer memory as Jobs is looking forward towards HTML5 and sees Flash as being something from the past. Now that Apple is going as far as to keep flash off the ipad, there is a growing backlash against Flash and Flash websites. The unfortunate thing is, that other mobile producers just religiously follow suit in this regard.

An emphasis on practicality, nevertheless, is never a gesture to underplay the importance of graphic design. On the contrary, getting rid of flash actually gives more freedom to creative design. And there is a growing number of tools available now to create motions to a static page, for example by using slider shows etc.

If you are building a website now, you definitely want to keep these issues in mind and consider whether or not you really want a flash website.  Futureproofing should always be in the mind of website owners.  After all, if you are building a website now, you don’t want to have to have it rendered useless years down the line and pay for the website just for a visual enjoyment.

a. Probing into the market before starting to furnish your office.

In the second year of college, I met a young British entrepreneur, David Hong, who, like everyone else, sees nothing but money on this exotic piece of land. He wants to set up a company that provides interpretation services via mobile phone. He was so obsessed with his creativity that he hast into furnishing his call centre without giving a second thought of its market size. The outcome was traumatic. In a friendly conversation with him three years later, my initiative to help him revisit those old memories is an excruciating but meaningful process. He told me that before creating a tangible business module, he should have created a website to probe into the market first and foremost.  It would not only assist him to more specifically target the potential group, it would also help to attract more investments on the telecommunication platform on which he intended to operate his interpretation service.

b. Necessity in the “Search Engine World”

Imagine the following scenario when a consumer types “eggplant digital” into a search engine, and the results that come up are “Eggplant: Digital Art” or “Digitalized Eggplant Farm on sale” etc. No one who is trying to find a web developer so far would be so loyal to Eggplant Digital that they don’t replace you with “web developer” in the search box. Then another potential client is snatched away by yet another modern-age trickery. What makes this more compelling is the fact that most of the leads nowadays are generated by the random blind searches instead of specifically knowing your company name before locating online. For companies hurtfully involved in a massive competition, the loss on your part would be a gain for your biggest competitor. Since the introduction of “www” in early 1990s, we have seen vast transformation from an URL attached by nothing but an advertising banner, to E-bay, Amazon, these web pages where actual businesses are happening.  If time is not a perimeter in this leverage, what you are losing is gold.

c. Online corporate image matters! a lot!

There is always this subtle chemistry in business that stops you from moving on to the next company. The extent to which this operation resembles finding a date is remarkable. Judging from his/her appearance, you can already imagine how your future baby would look like. Website has become the real appearance of your business. The taste of a stylistic choice often speaks for a bulk of your understanding of your own business as well as the concerning industry. At the same time, the way that you organize your website is always considered to be a vital sign of your internal management, regardless of the size of your organization. With the increasing popularity of Social Networking, pasting and sharing your URL is second-to-non option for today’s marketing campaigns. This volatile environment has taught us never underestimate the power of the first impression, and the possible depth a customer can relate to that.

One thing that needs to be said with absolute confidence is that your input in website is more of an investment rather than an one-time consumption that satisfies your momentary needs for being part of the fashion. Today’s web platform, powered by a boom of internet innovations, is asserting its dominance over the entire business world. Simply, an ever-widening public celebration has left each of us no excuse to back off from the trend.

To get yourself set up with an account, you need a Google Local Business Ad account, which you can log into with your Google account. Once logged in you can add you business in, check back after 24 hours and you will be listed. The service is completely free, so I recommend jumping in and setting it up now. Once your set up remind your customers to visit the page and give you a review!

For publishers here’s how you can add that nice little tool functionality to your website if you’re using WordPress for your articles (like we do):

Sign up for an account at www.sharethis.com and configure your account to fit your information.

Get your button to put on your website and, again, configure it to fit your needs. You can select the services you want to share your content with and even change the text that’s accompanying the button.

Select the service you are going to use it for. You have 4 options to choose from: Any website, WordPress, TypePad and Blogger (for our how-to we’re going to continue with the WordPress option).

Press the button “Get the Code” and download the plugin for your WordPress installation. Put it in your “wp-content/plugins” directory and enable the plugin in the WordPress Admin panel “Plugins”.

After enabling the plugin go to the ShareThis control panel under “Settings > ShareThis”, copy the code you got on the ShareThis website, paste it into the box provided and click the Update button.

If you feel that only your blog posts need to have this button you can just go to your WordPress Admin panel > Settings > ShareThis and change the setting on “Automatically add ShareThis to your pages?” to “no”.

For the more experienced WordPress users, and for those with access to the sourcefiles of WordPress, you can also set both settings to “No”, get the ShareThis template tag (<?php if (function_exists('sharethis_button')) { sharethis_button(); } ?>) and put it anywhere you want it to appear on your pages. This way you can style it as you want according to the look and feel of your own theme.

Now all pages and posts you have made, and all other ones you are going to make in the future, will have this nifty little button attached to its tail. Readers can now share your content very easy by clicking the button, selecting their service and sending it to their beloved ones.

The main reason for this is that Baidu, China’s most popular search engine with a market share of more than 62 percent, is able to recognise the pinyin words in the URL and then link them to what they stand for in Chinese characters.

It is also worth remember to leave out any hyphenation, and just write the words out in a long string. Otherwise it may interfere with the search engines ability to connect the words meaning together.

Within WordPress there are two places to make the change to a permalink. Firstly on the posts or pages listing page, you can click on ‘Quickedit’ and then edit the ‘Slug’. Alternatively you can edit the post or page, and just below the title input box there is an editable Permalink.

The second option is only available if you have already turned on Permalinks, if you find you cannot edit it, then click on the button ‘Permalink’ that appears beside the URL and update your Permalink Settings (also located under Settings > Permalinks).

Finally, for the Permalink settings I always choose the 3rd setting ‘Month and name’ if I am doing a blog and if it is a website I use the custom setting and enter ‘/%category%/%postname%/’.

Hopefully these tips will help with your WordPress based Chinese langage websites.

Thanks to Duncan Leung for his support on SEO related questions in China!

The Problems With Online Voting Systems

Any online voting system cannot be 100% full proof, if the user really wants to vote mulitple times, there is no 100% bullet proof way we can stop them doing that. But, in order to make it as hard as possible to cheat we have 3 lines of defense.

The Voting Process

Defense Line 1) Stopping robots or programs spamming the voting form

The voter begins the process by choosing the category of award they want to vote in, after this they get the list of options for who they can vote for.

Below the list is an input box for their email address, a message for the user and a validation vote input field. In order to stop a someone writing a script that fills out the form multiple times as if it is a human, we added a ‘Captcha‘.

What is a Captha? A CAPTCHA is a program that can generate and grade tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs cannot.

Defense Line 2) Stopping people voting multiple times

When the user votes, they are required to give their email address. When the system recieves the vote, it generates a special URL that is emailed to the user. The user then must click on that link in their email to process the vote. Until the user clicks on that link, the vote will not be counted.

Each vote is collected into a database, the system will only allow one vote per email address. So once the user has confirmed a vote via email, the user cannot then make another vote using the same email address.

Defense Line 3) Recording the IP address

Another form of security is that the system also records the IP address of the user. This helps us to check whether there have been multiple votes from a single IP address. This may happen under a few circumstances, firstly the same user has persistently voted multiple times by creating new email addresses from which to confirm the vote. The second senerio is that a network of computers in an office goes through the same IP address to access the internet. In this case we could guess that perhaps a whole company has voted for the same person from the same office building.

Not 100% Reliable

It is not very wise to use an online voting system where there is no other form of analysis. The reason it works here for us, is that the final analysis and decision for the winners is made by judges, who actually meet the finalists. The voting is set to be a supplementary way to show the popularity of the finalists with the public, but as there are still loop holes, it is not a full proof method for getting a fair vote.

Click here to learn more about the British Business Awards

Traditional Media Is A One Way Affair

TV, radio, cinema, advertising, billboards etc are about sending a message repeatedly to the viewer. In the past there was not much reason or way for viewers to get a message back to the original message creators! Of course there was a conversation that may occur after a message has been read, for example between friends or family. But it was fairly difficult with traditional media to tune into that discussion. For example after an advertisement has been shown on TV, who knows what the viewers said or thought about after that advertisement had aired?

Is Your Website Static?

So considering that traditional media is working in this one way setting, think about your own website? When was it last updated? When was the last time someone gave you feedback on it? When was the last time you checked how many visitors you have? Is your website using a traditional media method on a new media setting? If the answer is YES, then I think you could be in time for an update!

Here are 5 ways you can get more out of your website:

1) A website is not a static presentation of your company, it is powerful through point for a discussion with your customers!

If you cannot update your website, it is time to throw it out and get something you can update. A website is a tool and if you cannot update it then your tool is broken! Businesses cannot afford to sit on the by lines and not talk to their customers, you need to get yourself out into the discussion and your website is a great starting point.

2) Give Important People In Your Organisation Access To Editing & Writing Content For Your Website!

The knowledge and expertise of your business is in the people within your organistation. If you have been impressed or captivated by one of your employees, then why not let them speak more to your customers? Let them write up case studies, write a blog, send out newsletters or publish articles. All great ways to get more information about your company out there and give your employees a feeling of commitment and responsiblity to talk about your company.

3) Give your customers easy ways to contact you, write about you and show how they feel about you

Your heart rate may increase at the thought of letting your customers speak out about you or your product on your actual website, but the truth is without that information and discussion you are missing a valuable way to improve. Possible ways to get more feedback from your audience are company or product blogs, forums, contact forms, 24 hour online support.

4) Find out where your customers hang out online, and go hang out there too

In order to help move discussions to your website, think about where your potential customers are hanging out online. Perhaps it is on websites such as Linkedin, or forums connected to your product or services, or networking groups. Where ever it maybe, contributing to a discussion in those places and linking back to your website could help make useful new connections.

5) If you are not sure where to start, get some pro’s in to help

It can be a daunting task just to think about new technology or new concepts, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t act as soon as possible. The first steps can be the most difficult, but after you have the right tools and the direction, you will be on the path to having a website that serves your oragnisation better.

Simon Adriatico – CMO @ P1.cn

P1.cn is China’s elite social networking site for the very (very) good looking. Solely targeting China’s rising affluent class or to be more specific those who are making RMB 100,000 +¬¨‚Ć annually. P1.cn is an invite only site that has managed to get 500,000 subscribers of the biggest brand loving show offs China has to offer. In order to maintain a fixed focus on their core user group and to keep a sharply defined edge that resonates with their audience, P1.cn has come up with a list of top 10 laws social marketing that keeps the organisation inline.

1) Don’t Do One Night Stands

Social marketing is about building, refining and committing to a relationship with your users. Campaigns are unlikely to be successful overnight or even over a month period. It is the sustained effort to communicate back and forth with the user group that gets the results.

2) People In Social Networks ‘Do’ Things

It is important to be aware of what the members within a social network are actually doing. In this way, marketing efforts can be designed to facilitate members in what they enjoy. This is likely to make more impact on them and encourage the discussion to go outside the members network, bringing about greater brand awareness.

3) Be Nice

Within a social network with like minded people, manners are important. Talk in a way that will encourage people to talk back. This point reminds me of chat rooms in the late 90′s, it was always the guy who came in and started swearing at everyone, who got hurled with abuse and ultimately kicked out of the group.

4) Build Scalable Campaigns

Generally speaking a key idea of a social network is that it should grow. Obviously networks will come in different sizes, but the hope will always be that there are more users, more conversations, more interactions and more fun. Keeping in tune with this, marketers should think out their campaigns in order to make them scalable, so that they can grow with a network.

5) Have A Conversation

A conversation is a constant process of feedback and revision, it is not a one sided viewpoint. Marketers should be seeding conversations with what they want to say, but perhaps more than that, they should be listening to what feedback they are getting and making sure they revise the message to push the conversation along further.

6) Influence Not Interference

Social networks are about people using tools and doing things that they want to do. Anything that gets in their way becomes an interference that could potentially diminish opinions. It¬¨‚Ć comes down to this idea of seeding a campaign into a social network, rather than just planting it directly in front of the users face. Furthermore, if marketers can influence the ‘real’ influencer’s in a social network, then they could be onto something really successful.

7) Tit For Tat

A social network of ‘one’, would not be much fun. Having a profile on social network is only cool, when you know there are people who might look at it. Making sure campaigns are a two way approach where everyone benefits is important in providing an experience suitable for a social media.

Good Social Ideas Can Spread, Recruit & Multiply

Generally speaking there is more potential for social ideas to spread faster than with traditional media, however the strength of the idea will determine how far and how fast it will spread. If your idea sucks, then don’t expect much impact, throwing ideas around with those who have experience first is a good way to catch the bad ones before they go to far.

9) Be Measurable

There are many ways to measure what you do on the web, in fact you can have numbers coming out of your ears. But it is still hard to effectively measure ‘word of mouth’. P1.cn message here was to experiment and keep coming up with new ways to try to trace actions through the discussions.

10) It Is Social Mixing Not Direct Marketing

Throw out the idea of stepping into a network and directly marketing your product, you’ll be smelt out a mile away. The point is to offer something constructive to the group that facilitates the discussion. Try to mix into the network and be a constructive member, otherwise it is all to easy to be tuned out.

Are you good looking enough to get signed up to P1 Network?

Learn more about IABC

IABC held an interesting seminar yesterday with 3 guest speakers discussing their thoughts and experiences with Social Media in China. This post is about Allen Wang’s¬¨‚Ć speech profiling his social networking site babytree.com and what it means to do social media successfully in China.

Allen Wang @ babytree.com

Allen Wang is one of the founding members of babytree.com, a social networking site targeted at young Chinese mom’s. In China there is an expression for the generation of Chinese people born during the 1980′s (80√Ç√™√©), which refers to the generation of young people that grew up after the ‘single child policy’ was brought about. And who during the mid to late nineties, whilst in high school were among the first in China to start using the internet. So as this generation matures as a consumer group, they are now proving to be one of the key demographics to target through the internet.

80′s Generation Take Center Stage On The Internet

In his presentation, Allen enlightened us by explaining that the 80′s born women who are now mom’s are taking centre stage as consumers. The women who are without siblings, and therefore lacking in role models, support and experience in how to bring up their babies, are turning to the internet to find out more about raising a child or preferred products to buy for their children.

Give The People What They Need

Babytree.com enters by giving these young Chinese mom’s a platform to meet, discuss, share, recommend and more. Allen and his partners, in what appears almost obvious in retrospect, have realized that there is a unique opportunity to bring these mom’s together in an online environment, where they can feel ownership over the site and where they can find useful tools to communicate. In doing so Babytree has built a niche marketing platform for businesses to utilize to get their products targeted to this specific group.

In reality this gives a win – win situation to both the mom’s and the businesses that look to serve them products that ultimately should benefit them. The mom’s help to keep the products useful, by talking and discussing the good and bad points. Businesses get to learn what their consumers really think about their products, so from a marketing perspective it makes a lot of sense for a business to get involved with this kind of Social Network.

6 Pointers For The Brave Corporate / Brand Marketers

At the end of his presentation Allen gave 6 useful tips for marketers to think about when looking to use Social Media, here are the main points:

1. Be brave and experiment – This is ‘New Media’, it is not always gonna work out perfectly, but with the speed and responsiveness of the internet, there are certainly great possibilities for those who are brave enough to jump in and start communicating.
2. Dramatically shift budget mix to internet – The internet is here to stay, so as Allen suggests it is time to at least start considering splitting the marketing budget between more traditional marketing and internet marketing.
3. Leverage the latest technology РNew technology is changing the way consumers view media, products etc. For example in China the internet has become a media distribution system, with video / music websites taking a large portion of web goers time. The PC has¬† now become the new status symbol for wealth in many households, rather than the TV. Understanding how consumers use these technologies is crucial for finding ways to approach these consumers.
4. Internet is a great communication channel – China has done a great job at installing broadband networks across much of the country, so utilizing internet technology can allow businesses to communicate their products across 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier cities, where there is still incredible buying power. Unlike TV, the internet offers the potential to start dialogues with these consumers and influence buying decisions.
5. Get into a dialogue with consumers – businesses are typically used to talking about their products at consumers, as traditional media is mostly a one way affair. However with the internet the opportunity is to get a dialogue started, so that internet goers actually carry on the conversation. The conversation should not be thought of as two way either, but instead can be considered a multi-way conversation where some people will talk together or talk louder or not talk at all. It is no good for businesses to just stand by and monitor the dialogue, it is much better to try and get involved.
6. May need to change how you manage – Allen finished his 6 points, by saying that the next generation of 90′s born young people are now graduating and looking for jobs. This group is almost more internet savvy than the previous generation and will require businesses to adapt to new ways to manage and communicate with their employees. Social media may come more into play internally in having a dialogue with your employees and getting the most out of them.

Overall Allen Wang gave us a lot of food for thought and covered a lot of ground. Personally I came away understanding more about how finding a niche user group and providing them with interesting tools is a powerful way to build an interactive audience through which marketers can learn and push useful products.

Learn more about the IABC

Check out Babytree.com

On the left is an example of my email signiture, which also includes links to my Linkedin page, Facebook page and Eggplant Flickr account. These are also pretty useful in getting colleague’s, clients and friends to connect with you.

To add Social Networking Links, Blog Posts, Instandt Messenger details and more, you simple need to use two things, Mozilla FireFox and this neat little addon. FireFox is the already hugely popular open source web browser. One of the coolest features of FireFox is all the great addons it has which extend its functionality. Wisestamp is one such plugin that helps you to create enhanced email signatures for your webmail services such as Gmail ,Yahoo Mail ,AOL and Hotmail.

If you are already using FireFox, just {click this link} to begin installing the plugin, if you are not using FireFox, download and install it first here. Once everything is installed, you will see a small icon in the bottom right of the browser (Hint: it look like a small stamp). Click on this to bring up some options > then click on ‘Edit Signature’.

Within the new window panel that pops up you will see a blank form where you can type in your details, plus input fields in the bottom half of the panel where you can add your Social Profiles, Instant Messenger Connections and your RSS feed.

Under the RSS feed you will be able to add your blog RSS feed. From this Wisestamp will then automatically grab your latest post and add it into you email signature.

Hopefully this will help to brighten up your emails. Try it out!

Content

The first way your site can be extended is through content. WordPress allows you to create multiple pages of content with text and images. Of course if you want to have a blog, you can also add content as posts. The difference between a page and a post, is pages are single individual pieces of content, and usually have their own navigation button on the site navigation. Whereas a single page can then have multiple posts nested inside itself, as you would see on a blog. Posts can also be dropped into categories, so that you can have certain categories of posts displayed on certain pages. This allows posts to be separated.

Widgets

Another great way the site can be exteneded is through widgets. These appear in your ‘sidebar’, which is basically a column that can be positioned on the left or right of the site. WordPress allows you to include different sidebars on different pages, which is pretty useful. For example on our site, on the hire us page we have the address in the sidebar, but on the blog we have a ‘tag cloud’ and ‘recent posts’. These are 2 different sidebars.

Within the sidebar we have little blocks which do stuff (Widgets). In the WordPress backend you can edit, add and remove these Widgets under ‘Appearance’.

There are many different Widgets to choose from, so it is worth getting in there and adding and removing them, to see which ones are useful for your site!

Plugins

WordPress is created in such a way that allows other developers to create useful ‘tools’ that can be literally plugged into your WordPress installation. There are so many plugins available now that almost everything you could imagine has been done in one form or another.

You can actually browse and install plugins directly from your WordPress installation, just login find the ‘Plugins’ tab on the left hand navigation, click ‘Add New’ and do a search from there.

Themes

If you have some knowledge of HTML, CSS or even PHP, you can also start to change the appearance of your WordPress site, by using the ‘Editor’ function under the ‘Appearance’ tab.

The power of having your website running on WordPress, is that you can do SO much in extending your website yourself. Whether it is adding new pages or extending it through plugins, there are unlimited ways available to work on your site!

Not able to update your site? Hire us to convert your site to WordPress today!

WordPress

Undoubtedly the most popular and useful platform with our clients is the Content Management System (CMS) WordPress. The fact is, WordPress is easy to use, easily extendable, good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), adaptable in design and maintained by a large community of developers.

Check out some of the sites we have worked on recently:

• newzealandinsoutheastasia.com
• lammedia.com.cn
• britishbusinessawards.cn
• g-cartridge.com
• urbanangelsagency.com
• xiubeijing.com

ZenCart

Perhaps not as well known as WordPress, the second most commonly used platform for our clients is an open source ecommerce platform. ZenCart is designed to give users an easy interface, tons of features and a good support community. Although it is not the easiest of platforms to develop with, we have found once the online store is set up, it does prove easy for our clients to run.

Here are a couple of stores using WordPress

• mayaroad.com
• zoeandco.com

SugarCRM

Third on the list, is the incredibly powerful and adaptable Customer Relationship Management (CRM) SugarCRM. For small to medium sized business, Sugar gives a huge array of options, an easy to use interface with multi language and with over 1,000,000 downloads, there is a strong community ready to provide support.

Google Apps

These days more and more people are using Gmail for their personal email, but did you know that you can use Gmail for your business too? Businesses who need up to 20 users can get a free account including Email, Instant Messenger, Online Word Processor, Spreadsheets and a Calender. The great thing is you can use the services with your business domain name, so your email will still be @yourcompany.com rather than @gmail.com.

Learn all about it here

MailChimp

The final platform on our list is for doing Email Marketing, MailChimp just about makes it on here due to its free option for up to 500 subscribers. MailChimp offers a great interface, tons of free email templates, good reporting and more. It is certainly worth considering if your business needs to publish a monthly newsletter.

Check it out here

There are plenty of other free platforms out there, which ones are you using?

During October, Eggplant attended the Wordcamp 2009 in Beijing. Overall the event was ok, but perhaps lacking in any serious content.

One speaker Nikolay Bachiyski did give some interesting information about what to expect from the next latest and greatest version of WordPress (2.9+)

Here are a five things to look forward to:

Undelete

The delete button will be swapped for a trash button, which will move items (pages, posts, media etc) to a trash bin where it can be retrieved if required. This will mean accidently deleting items will be a thing of the past!

Media Overhaul

The entire media section has been completely rewritten, including the addition of galleries, ¬¨‚Ć90-degree rotation, cropping and resizing. The idea here will be the user will no longer need to ‘photoshop’ their images before they upload them.

Easier Embedding

Although this is not finalized yet, we can look forward to more improvements to the embedding of photos, videos, links etc.

WordPress Handbook

WordPress will be getting a new Handbook that will be a core basic guide to using WordPress. Nikolay mentioned an online version and also a version that can be printed out.

Glotpress

Not exactly a new feature of WordPress, but rather an addition to the WordPress family. GlotPress will let developers translate their favourite software. It is web-based and open-source.

According to the man himself this is what makes GlotPress special:

• Totally usable. Not less than a desktop client. Keyboard only editing, shortcuts.
• Very small and simple, but infinitely extensible. Just like WordPress.
• Perfect for team collaboration.
• Easing comin’, easy goin’. Import and export gettext files. API to be sure everything is in sync.

Developers can check it out here

Organized by: WordCamp China

About WordCamp China: WordCamp China, a platform to discuss WordPress, is open to all enthusiasts, blog users and developers. The General Assembly will focus on WordPress and relevant topics of independent bloggers. Here, you can meet Bloggers and developers, you can listen to the lectures of many well-known Blogger.

Website: http://2009.wordcampchina.org/

Date: 2009/08/22

Venue: Qing Hua Keji Yuan Yangguang Ting 清华科技园“阳光厅”

Map: http://2009.wordcampchina.org/map

Event: WordCamp Lectures

Guestlist in the Morning: Nikolay Bachiyski

Zhan Bin (Topic: My Press)

Wang Chao Qun (Topic: Microsoft’s new support for PHP makes WordPress rise in IIS7)

Guestlist in the Afternoon: Cosbeta (Topic: Idea Exchange of the cache in WordPress and PHP)

Jason Ng (Topic: Enhance the blog reading experience)

mg12 (Topic: The production ideas of WordPress theme and marketing strategy)

If you confirm to go, you need to register online first and pay the entrance fee RMB 30: http://2009.wordcampchina.org/register

You can check your ID name after finishing the payment here: http://2009.wordcampchina.org/beijing2009/attendees

Beijing | Singapore 2nd March 2009. EASTWEST Public Relations, a leading independent agency in Asia with offices in Singapore and China, has invested in Beijing-based interactive marketing consultancy, Eggplant Digital, arming the agency with an improved arsenal of digital capabilities.

EASTWEST PR took a stake in Eggplant Digital to strengthen its ability to deliver interactive media relations for its clients in the business-to-business (B2B) space, while retaining its core competence in public relations. The close proximity of Eggplant Digital consultants and technology team provides EASTWEST clients with integrated marketing communications and digital solutions including social media releases and hosted press centres.

Eggplant Digital provides EASTWEST PR with a ‘digital difference’ by bringing greater interactivity, performance and measurability for clients,” said Jim James, Managing Director of EASTWEST Public Relations. “Our clients are asking for us to add value with every communication. Digital PR practices form an essential way to help our clients get noticed. The investment in Eggplant Digital gives our clients access to professional public relations‚Äö√ѬÆcounsel and innovative ways to deliver their key messages to the market.”

“With the investment by EASTWEST, Eggplant Digital benefits from both management expertise and working capital that enables us to focus on our core competencies, helping our clients better engage with their digital audience,” said Strategy Director Oliver Dooley. “EASTWEST nurtures a philosophy of leveraging technology as an enabler and multiplier for its clients as well as its consultants. We hold complimentary views and complimentary objectives.”

Early projects developed by the combination of EASTWEST domain expertise and Eggplant technical knowledge include social media releases for Telegent and the development of a hosted press centre for the British Business Awards. Social media releases include multimedia elements and allow analytics which demonstrate to clients which journalists have an interest in particular news. The hosted press centre is a platform which integrates a content management system with social media network tools to create a powerful audience engagement tool.

About EASTWEST Public Relations Ptd Ltd

EASTWEST Public Relations was founded in Singapore in 1995 as a privately held company and opened a wholly owned foreign enterprise in Beijing in January 2006. The agency focuses on key B2B verticals including technology, healthcare and education. The agency has built CONNECT, a proprietary knowledge management platform that enables faster time-to-market with news and delivers greater effectiveness and efficiency in getting clients noticed. EASTWEST is a Brodeur|PLEON Worldwide partner, and a member of the IPRN network. Clients include ECA International, Emerson Network Power, Logica, MSI Global Alliance, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, Qunar.com, SunGard, Telegent, TippingPoint, Verimatrix and more. For more information, please visit www.eastwestpr.com.