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Admittedly, it has been a number of years since I have put together a website, but I enjoy the process of creation.

The last time I put together a website was for a collaborative video project called “World, What To Do?” It was a project combining the efforts of China-based YouTube vloggers to come together and create a fool-proof (and up-to-date) travel guide for people coming to China for the first time.

We assembled a team of expats based in China (Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and more), USA (Seattle), Japan (Okazaki), and more to create videos specifically for the cities they knew inside and out.

Here is the link to my playlists of videos in Tianjin and Chengdu (northeast and southwest China).

It was quite the fun project, and not only did it gain (in my eyes) a sizable amount of views, but provided me an opportunity to learn some new skills in website design. I built the design from scratch with free tools, painstakingly adjusting the HTML to make the banners, headers, text, and borders JUST right.

After weeks of assembling everyone’s biographies, photographs, creating all the hyperlinks, page directories, page content, forum, contact forms, “audience interaction activity” pages, and getting feedback from the team — not to mention filming, editing, releasing, and promoting my videos themselves all on my own — the site launched!

….to less than 100 views in the first week or so. A terribly disappointing result. The coming weeks, despite my efforts to spur the team and keep new content coming on the website, spelled the end of the newly-created website. I don’t believe that views ever got above 300 total in the next 2-3 months.

The project failed to sustain itself. Although we managed to put out quite a lot of videos and help quite a lot of people learn about our little corners of China, we were never able to ultimately sustain the momentum of keeping up with all of the various demands of content creation, promotion, website maintenance, and even more, given that this had all been for fun while we had our full-time jobs as teachers, fashion designers, etc.

Then the pandemic came in 2020, and us being based in China completely shut down what was already a fizzling-out project.

I downloaded the data and took it down.

Looking back, I learned quite the valuable lesson: just because a person puts an ungodly amount of work into something does not automatically means it is going to work, and a plan needs to be put into place in case of failure. I suppose I had not quite learned the lesson of the classic: “hope for the best, prepare for the worst.”

I was a 26-year-old very busy English teacher at the time, so although I luckily hadn’t poured my whole identity into the project, it still hurt.

Now, being eight or so years past this project time, hardly dwell upon it, but when I do, I think:

1. You built a working website by yourself. Nobody can take that away from you.
2. You (and others) helped build a team and create a really cool and unique project in a place that many would think wouldn’t be possible.
3. You have learned that slower, more measured steps taken on a consistent basis always wins over brute-forcing your way into doing something.
4. Just because you’ve never done something before doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.

So, with all of this in mind, only two things to do: head down, and keep moving forward with small, but steady steps.

That’s probably enough for today. Quite nice, actually – writing it all down – haven’t done that in a long time!

I’ve got the AZ-900 to study for — it’s time to log into Azure and play around and see how I can spend that $200 credit!