Feng Shui has always been linked with the practice of understanding living conditions to maximize the flow of ‘positive’ energy into one’s home and life. It is a study of the harmony of nature. Such is the power of Feng Shui that it has found its way into the
internet.

With that, we are proud to announce that we have recently setup a blog for Master Boon who is an established Feng Shui master currently based in Australia.

The blog features insights into Master Boon’s never-ending quest for knowledge as she shares with us her thoughts and experiences. It documents her travels and contains interesting articles which provide an engaging look into the world of Feng Shui.

Do visit her blog at www.BoonYap.com to learn more about Feng Shui and many other interesting aspects of life. Then perhaps, we might be able to get a complimentary consultation for our office.

“I work as a web Developer and I am often accused of being over critical of websites, the e-visa process was fantastic. Easy to understand website, quick to use, looked good and clear understanding of what is going on during the process. Looking forward to using the visa very soon.” Mike Morley, November 12, 2007

It’s indeed an honor to be commended by a fellow Web Developer as we hope to improve on our strengths.

When we enter the website, the sentences shown in the Flash banner will be in its original language, which is English. The variable and data (sentences) that shown in the Flash are stored in a php file. When want to change the contents of website to another language, the php file will call to translation part.

Process of forming the translation file are as below:
A tool, gettext is run in order to extract all the translatable strings from the sources (which stored in php) and implant them in a single .POT file.

This .POT file is actually a .PO (Portable Object) template that you distribute to your translators in order for them to translate it.

The translators will send you back a .PO file, containing both the original English version and
the translated strings.

After that, compilation of the .PO file into a .MO (Machine Object) file is done. It is stored at
the correct place in the defined directory and file naming organization.

Then, the _() function in the php file will automatically display the translated strings in the Flash banner at that website, depending on the locale set at runtime.

Flash file

We used Flash as the platform to display the data that are called from a php file. Inside Flash, a set of Action Script is written in order to get the data from php file that is stored in server. A simple script will load the php file and get the variables contain in it and output the data in text field which is located in the flash. Below are the coding part:

PHP

The php file will get call from script. Once the data are checked, it will call the translation part. The _( ) function in php file is very important as the data written within the brackets will be the gettext for file.PO.
Below are the variable and data for php file:

Translation

When php file calls for translation, the data within _( ) function will be the gettext in form of file.PO. This is the language that read by human. Once the file is saved, the PO program will auto generate the saved file as MO (Machine Object) file. This MO file is actually the language which read by machine.

Download the sample for flash here

As a leading build and operate online business service provider, 1.com.my ensures that clients conduct their businesses well. We communicate with clients to enhance corporate competitiveness and also think from the customer side to strengthen their loyalty and ultimately towards their potential prospects.

Recently, one of an interesting online businesses, a4trip.com, was launched. Some of the Web Developer Alliance (WDA) members were involved in this project as well.

Honestly, don’t you agree that traveling is fun but it ain’t easy? There are much to plan and think for a holiday and it’s normal that one will get frustrated with decisions (basic ones!) such as on the types of flights to take, types of accommodation as well as different types of nice food to be hunted for. And most importantly, not to miss out on those ‘hot-spots’!

Don’t let this ruin your beautiful holiday. This is where A4trip.com comes in, as a one-stop online travel guide.

Despite the fact that there are many travel guidebooks in the market, A4trip.com stands out with its specialties. The information in the guidebook comes from feedback and suggestions right from the travelers themselves. Since it is online, travelers can download and print it out, You could carry all your need on the pieces of papers right in your pocket!

For further information, please visit http://www.a4trip.com

‘Feeding a fish with a carrot.’ Doesn’t really makes sense does it? Feeding a rabbit with a carrot would seem to be a sentence more grounded in reality. Anyway, let’s leave that aside for the moment (it’ll make sense later) and get to what we’re trying to say here. Now, ask any online business today whether they would like to get their hands on the international market and they’ll probably say, “What an unnecessary question that is!�?

Ask them if they would want to reach 180 countries, they will very likely say, “Who doesn’t?�?

Few online businesses limit themselves to the local market yet in venturing into the international market, all are faced with challenging issues. Below are some points that will help you see some of those issues.

What’s the world’s most widely spoken language?

If you say it’s English without any second thoughts and therefore believe that’s the language that will solve all your problems, well, you’re half-right. You may however, want to give the Long tail model a chance to explain to you that you will need other languages to capture untapped markets. See, estimates of English speakers around the world vary from 275 million to 450 million, while Spanish number from 150 to over 300 million, Hindi speakers are projected to be around 150 to 350 million, and Russian from 150 to 180 million.

So yeah, English is maybe the language that most people around the globe speak, but there are substantial numbers of other languages that online businesses must consider in their endeavors to reach the international market.

What is Google?

To an American, Google is a household name for search engines. While in Korea, Google’s Korean-language search service makes up only less than 2% of search page views and search-related ad revenues. Makes you wonder if it’s the same Google!

Americans consider flash and graphic objects in a website as being superfluous and ostentatious. Its pictures and rich interfaces serve only as distractions rather than aids to them, and most times they would be better suited just to use the old fashioned and simple-looking alphabets to form words for communication. Strength in simplicity would seem to be their preferred modus operandi.

However, it has been noted that in the Asian culture there is a predilection in using ‘characters’ or graphic representation of words to communicate. As such, a powerful search engine like Google would not seem as promising to some simply because of its primitive and unsophisticated look. Talk about being worlds apart!

Not everyone is savvy

Language is not the only barrier that you have to cross. You may think that you’re reaching your target audience with the media that you’ve chosen. But don’t overlook the fact that there can be things that can be overlooked.

Like under-developed nations who are not as IT-savvy as others are or young people who may be using your system but have no clue whatsoever as to how to upload a system. Or maybe for some, English isn’t a mother tongue and certain systems may have to be simpler in its use of the language for them to understand. They may not also be familiar with jargons and terminologies associated with the system.

We believe the key is in various elements. One is coming up with a good keyword; a simple yet effective step that can help a lot. Another is the development of a simpler system that is able to be enhanced gradually with time.

With all that, you may just be able to feed a fish with a carrot!

So imagine my (pleasant) surprise when I landed on what is, by far, one of the best websites I’ve ever come across–both within and outside the travel industry. The website of the Royal Embassy of Cambodia is everything a website ought to be: informative, well-designed, easily navigated, and attractive.

This is one of the feedback we have received yesterday from Tricia Holly Davis, chief writer of Travolution Blog :)

Thank you for contacting XYZ. We have received your e-mail and our Customer Service personnel will respond to your inquiry soon. Generally, we respond within 48 hours. If you require immediate attention, please call us and our Customer Service personnel will be happy to assist you. Our office hours are from 8:30pm to 5:30am, EST or 1:30am to 10:30am, GMT/UTC, Mondays to Fridays.

Generally speaking, responding in 2 days to your potential customer shouldn’t be something you should be proud of. By including this statement in every one of your auto-responders only makes it worse. Email support, one of the most important element in every online store, should and must allow online sales to take place even during non-office hours.

Another common issue prominent in most websites is this disclaimer “My website is best viewed with 1024 x 768 resolution.” When building the website, shouldn’t multiple resolutions be taken into account in the first place? By limiting your website to specific browsers and screen sizes, what you are also doing is limiting the number of people who is experiencing a satisfactory shopping experience on your online store.

We are not even talking about accessibility issues yet, such as how to make your website friendly to blind visitors!

Sadly, many budding website owners still emphasize on nice-to-have features like shopping cart and membership systems, without a proper understanding of their target audience.

Find your audience today and give them what they want.

Lots of people will tell you they have an Internet business but the fact is, there’s no such thing – the Internet is not a business, it’s a tool. Granted there may be businesses that use the Internet and the growing army of web apps as their primary or only way to generate, nurture, and convert leads, but a business is still a business.

The reason I want to point this out so emphatically is that too many small business owners look at the Internet as some sort of disconnected form of business – disconnected that is from the rest of their business.

No matter what your business sells you must have a customer, you must have a compelling message, you must have something that people want, before you really have a business. You can’t simply add a blog to your marketing mix and think that you’ve harnessed the Internet. If you throw yourself into the Internet without the proper context of a business, you’ll likely waste your time, money and effort – and then you’ll conclude it doesn’t work for your kind of business.

I know there are lots of folks out there that will tell you differently – that you can throw anything on the web and call it a business, but I’m telling you, it’s not so, never has been, never will be. (By the way, selling you that dream is their business.)

The Internet is an essential piece of the marketing mix – Ignore it and you’ll be obsolete. But, use it to do things you can’t offline, amplify your message, build a community, automate marketing functions, serve clients and collaborate with partners, and do it all in order to attract more of your ideal client, communicate your core message, and build trust through education.

Now that’s what I call an Internet business.

Post by John Jantsch

Launched officially by the Government of Kingdom of Cambodia since April 2006, with more than 10,000 e-Visas issued up to date, to travelers from more than 120 countries world wide.

E-Visa are usable in 5 major entry ports including Phnom Penh International Airport, Siem Reap International Airport, Cham Yeam (Koh Kong), Poi Pet (Banteay Meanchey) and Bavet (Svay Rieng).

We have gathered feedbacks from tourists and improved the applications on the New Cambodia e-Visa System. The intention of this revamp is to make the e-Visa application process more user-friendly with better instruction and clearer direction.

The new e-Visa system now supports 25 languages, thanks to the 140 voluntary translators. It adapts easy to use methods and allows applicants to check and change applications online. Furthermore, the new e-Visa certificate looks exactly like an actual Visa, and we hope it makes traveling to Cambodia much easier and hassle less.

We would also like to thank all the tourists and team for their support in making this happen. We wish to improve further and increase the usage of e-Visa in any way we can. Thank you again for the feedbacks given. It has all been taken into consideration and we will look into these matters continuously. We are glad to uplift Cambodia’s tourists and business travelers to a new era of applying Visa. We hope to meet our objective in making the applications faster and convenience.

About Cambodia e-Visa:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation has launched official e-Visa, which enables you to apply for a Cambodia tourist visa online.

Instead of applying through Cambodian Embassy, all you need to do is to complete the online application form and pay with your credit card. After receiving your Visa through email, print it out and bring it along when you travel to Cambodia.

Apply Cambodia Visa Online

News like YouTube sold for 1.6 billion USD to Google, eBay acquired Skype for 2.6 billion often get all of us so excited and usually make us start to wonder about how we too can start something similar. Incidentally, AirAsia with their online booking system, grew their flight business continuously in the last 5 years.

AirAsia outsourced their booking engine to a third party solution provider, but we’ve never heard Larry of Google or Steve Chen of YouTube engaged similar strategy to develop the online business for them. Instead, their solution is “home-brewed”.

This is because AirAsia’s core business is to provide affordable flight (Everyone Can Fly!) and the booking engine is just a medium for the public to book their tickets. No matter how well they design the entire booking system, it is more important to have a well managed airline system. Outsourcing the ticket booking system can allow Tony to concentrate more on the airline business itself.

So, let’s look at a scenario here where Ah Beng wants to build a second eBay.

He proposed to us that he wants to build a platform like eBay and then asked us for a full-fledge proposal of the entire system. These people either do not understand what it cost to build a successful online business and instead of them providing us the specifications, they are asking us to do it for them. It’s like asking the architect to find me a good location for my next restaurant.

You might ask then, what kind of services we provide, since we don’t help people build their second eBay?

After Ah Beng realized how a second ebay wouldn’t work as he’d planned, he then started his own restaurant business in Klang Valley. Business grew by leaps and bounds. Reservations of table through the receptionist became a bottleneck with the increment of business volume. He then came to us again after realizing how an online reservation system can help him clear the bottleneck and at the same time how he can use the online medium to expand his market reach.

After outsourcing his entire online presence to us, Ah Beng can then continue to concentrate on his restaurant business, where his expertise lies in. From this experience, Ah Beng realized that a successful online strategy is very much like a good restaurant, where the owner must himself understand how the restaurant business works.

Of late, we have been getting more and more requests to help our clients set up a blog. There is no denying that blogs are quickly dominating the cyberspace; even the word “blog” itself became Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary‘s Word of the Year for year 2004. The word “blog” originated from two words, namely “web” and “log”. Putting them together yields “weblog”. These days “blog” is more commonly used.

The beauty of blogs is that it allows you to update your site much more easily. A blog publishing tool helps you to quickly update your contents, without the need for you to get your hands dirty fiddling with html codes all the time. Like conventional log books and diaries, blogs allow you to archive your older contents in chronological order. At any time you wish to view an older content, you can do so by browsing or simply searching the archives.

The Building Blocks of a Blog

Your archives are the ‘building blocks’ of your blog. Readers can easily tell if yours is new blog or an old blog from the date the first post was published. There is rarely a need for one to delete blog entries unless really necessary – for example, your blog has offensive contents and you run into some problems with the authorities.

Managing Your Site

As far as content management is concerned, rest assured that your site is in good hands. Various blog publishing software are available on the internet but they’re all similar in one way or another. WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Xanga and Blogspot are some examples. The booming of blogs was largely contributed by the emergence of free blog hosting providers such as Blogspot, Xanga and Blogdrive. However, free hosting usually means limited customization and personalization options, including having your own domain (such as http://www.<YourName>.com).

On the other hand, for those who want full control over their blog and those who wish to set up a corporate blog for example, a paid hosting is favorable. Corporate blogging is also quickly picking up pace because it provides a less-formal approach to delivering information and a unique reader-writer interaction. A reader who has something to add on to a particular blog entry can simply post a comment for it, if the comments feature is enabled.

Blogging Security

To curb spam and unwanted comments, most blog publishing tools allow comment-moderation; whereby a comment is made viewable only after the blog owner has approved it. Also, it is a good practice to not reveal personal information on your blog, such as vehicle registration number, identification numbers and home addresses, because no matter how ‘private’ you claim your blog to be, it is always viewable to virtually anyone who has an internet access.

Readership and Frequency of Updates

A blog comes ‘alive’ only if you maintain it well. By this, I mean your contents should be up-to-date. It is fairly easy to know if a blog has been ‘abandoned’ from the main page. The main page is where the latest blog entry appears and if even the latest entry was posted say, 6 months ago, then the blog is as good as ‘dead’. This is certainly not desirable if you’re trying to attract readership.

‘Frequency of Update’ refers to how often you update your blog. Some blogs are updated daily, some twice daily, and some once weekly. You may not actually need to adhere to a fixed period. However, note that a low frequency of update may result in a decline in readership. On the other hand, too high a frequency could result in the latest entries not having sufficient ‘airtime’. Readers seek information that is new, up-to-date and relevant to them. Fulfilling this criteria coupled with a friendly interface can help build and sustain your readership base.

Blogging Ethics

Bloggers are often likened to journalists. That said, however, information and first-hand news provided by bloggers usually go unfiltered. More people are turning to blogs for latest news but how far are they true? Spreading rumours and lies is deemed inethical. Articles and contents taken from other sources should be rightfully attributed, and credited. Copying others’ work without properly attributing the work to the original author is considered plagiarism, and should be avoided. The least you could do is include a hyperlink to the source from which the content was taken.

Conclusion

Blogging offers you the convenience of publishing your contents without much fuss, and even allows readers to comment on your entries. It does not take a rocket scientist to maintain a blog site either; all you’ve got to do is write your heart out and be heard. Sounds convincing? Hop onto the bandwagon today and experience for yourself the power of blogs!

We believe in ‘hard work does pay’ phrase. The more we work out, the finer it will get. This is what we have been standing on since the day we took off as the trusted company to build the site for D’RAX Corporation Sdn Bhd, www.draxcorp.com.my. Compiled with innovative ideas and touches of designed, we are proud to present the site to the eyes of you. The main idea of the site is to provide information of the company in a clear-cut design, which combined a simple design with the manipulation of interesting graphics. In order to produce the finest result, research has been done and long-hour discussion has been held. At last, we have came out with concept of weaver bird to resemble the spirit of the company.

Known as the Baya Weaver bird, it is belongs to the family of the weaver bird. Famous of its diligence in building up its home, it is indeed a fascinating bird. Base on its characteristic, the designer team has selected the bird as the main design concept theme for the site. Due to the profile of the company, which involve in decorators, interior and renovation, the perfect match knows it.

The image of the bird crafting it’s nest is chosen by us to show the diligences of the company and the team behind the stage on working out the best to present to its client. Credit should be given to Paul Huang who has successfully captured this wonderful panorama of the bird in Kranji, Singapore. Paul Huang is indeed a talented photographer and with his effort, he has come out with his own website to feature his masterpiece. For those who are interested, you can visit his site at www.naturestops.com.

It is our hope that this site will feature the best combination of information and design to cater your interest.