New IFC HK Website: Never Learned

A couple of friends in Facebook notified their connections through their respective walls about the new-look website of the International Finance Centre.

I must say that this is a welcome news, knowing that the previous version was more than half a decade old. Not that the old one was horrible looking (see Disclosure below.), but a lot of things must have evolved during the period that the website may. During the same feature, rivals Pacific Place, Citygate Outlets and Harbour City underwent online facelift.

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Octopus Rewards: Using Multiple URLs To Your Advantage

Many corporations own websites. But behind the domain names that hold these websites, there are possibly many other domains related to their brands. For example, Coca Cola, the beverage giant has a website at coca-cola.com. But it also owns plenty of other domains like coke.com, cocacola.com, and brand-related domain names to ensure the website captures all possible references to the popular brand or even associations with the products they do or products they make. That’s an ideal case of handling domain names.

While certain brands require a separate domain name and hold a different website to handle a distinct audience — just like cocacolazero.com or dietcoke.com — those that are deemed similar should be handled in systematic way. And to me, that means using them to the owner’s advantage.

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SCMP Email Marketing: When Campaigns Reach Dead End

I am a subscriber of South China Morning Post. As it adheres to subscription-based business model as opposed to relying it all on advertisers, I need to pay before I can read news stories.

I remember my renewal period is every March but yesterday I received a new email from SCMP asking me to renew my subscription. Not bad to anticipate continuity of subscriber base as a safeguard amid the dropping revenues from advertisers. The offer included an attractive freebie promised to be a quarter of yearly subscription cost. Looks like it’s a good one, I reckon. If I renew my subscription now I could get a HK$100 voucher from Pizza Express, Outback Steak or HMV. If I renew later I might not avail of such offers.

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Ajisen Ramen Hong Kong: Understanding Language of Your Audience

No doubt, Ajisen Ramen is my favorite Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong. When I’m seated, I seldom change my combo order of Tenderous Rib Ramen and Garlic Beef and every time I leave the shop, there’s always that feeling of having a great meal.

Ajisen Ramen has a website that provides list of menus and shop locations. But it seems that website planners don’t know who are the target audience. Why so? That’s because if you look at the website, there is no proper segregation of content based on language. For example, look at the screen

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Basic Web Analytics for Hong Kong City Guide Websites

How do website owners attract advertisers? The first thing that comes to mind is provision of unique, consistent content that’s useful to the advertiser’s target audience. This is quite subjective and also we find many similar sites in Hong Kong competing for attention. I wonder if the next step is.. grab an unsuspecting journalist and paint him/her a good picture about you, enough to catapult you into one of the feature stories for next issue. And throw in some random visitor stat numbers so if advertisers take a glance at the article, they’ll notice you.

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