ChinaSite.com: About US

  The Complete Reference to
China/Chinese-Related Web Sites
Please scroll down to the content !  
       
A Brief History of ChinaSite.com
How popular is the ChinaSite.com
Why is the ChinaSite.com so popular
Who visit the ChinaSite.com
Who owns and maintains the ChinaSite.com

    About China, you name it, we have it!  
3,400+ links to China/Chinese related Web sites.
Average 134,000 hits a day
Average 640,000 page views a month
See our site analysis for details

     
  A Brief History of ChinaSite.com

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Weiqing HuangChinaSite.com's founder Weiqing Huang still remember the first time, in 1993, when he used the Mosaic (the predecessor of Netscape browser) to surf the World Wide Web on the Internet at the University of Cincinnati where he went to Graduate School in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The first site he visited was the Picassos Project Group's web site in Department of Computer Science at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as he was doing the similar research.

Started then, Weiqing got addictive to the Internet. He surfed the Web day and night. What most interested him was the information regarding China. He started to search for China or Chinese related web sites on the Internet as a hobby. At that time, China or Chinese related web sites were so rare that all he was able to find were not more than twenty web sites. He put them into his "bookmark" of the browser. 

Jerry and DavidThe Internet grew so fast, so did the China/Chinese related web sites. His personal "China bookmark" grew larger and larger. He started to share them with his friends on the Internet, just as David Filo and Jerry Yang did in Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

After he left the university, Weiqing edited his "bookmarks" into a web page and put it on a friend's web server. The page was first publicly released on the Internet in August 1994 (Yahoo started their guide in April 1994).  He did not name it, but most people called it  "China/Chinese Related Web Sites" or "China Everything".  At that time, Yahoo was called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" (later changed to "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", hence the name of Yahoo), and still resided on Yang's student workstation "akebono" and Filo's computer "konishiki" at Stanford University (Jerry and David registered the domain name "Yahoo" on Jan 18, 1995).

The page actually was a mega-lists with comments and subjective "star-rating" made by Weiqing to indicate how attractive a site was and whether the site was worth your time to visit. People just liked the simple style and the commends with "star-rating" of Weiqing's China site list, and a lot of people bookmarked it or put it into their homepage, or even download and copy it into their own site, or translated it into Chinese language. Some people posted the whole mega-lists in several newsgroups for people to download for free. This helped the site widely spread on the Internet.

After the first release, the "China/Chinese Related Web Sites"  has grown to become one of  the most comprehensive directory and index web site regarding China and Chinese. It attracted a lot of people to visit, including people from Yahoo (The "China/Chinese Related Web Sites" listed more China-related links than Yahoo did then). The heave traffic caused the web server slow down. Required by the unhappy system administrator, the site was moved to a commercial ISP in 1995.

The site became larger and larger, and covered almost everything you can find on the Internet regarding to China or Chinese. Thus, the name changed to "The Complete Reference to China/Chinese Related Web Sites" with a slogan "About China, you name it, we have it! ", that was actually a comment made by one of the users on his homepage where he made a link to the site. Because of its frequent updates, easy-to-use style, and its comprehensiveness, the site became wildly popular for people interested in finding China/Chinese related information on the Internet. Therefore, the traffic increased so fast as to consume a great portion of  the small ISP bandwidth and slow down its server. Then the web site was second time kicked out by its host.

In April 1996, Weiqing Huang founded his own company, Aweto.com (Advanced Web Topology Company) in Chicago, Illinois. Aweto Company established its own dedicated Internet connection and servers in November 1996. The site of "The Complete Reference to China/Chinese Related Web Sites" finally settled down.

During this time, China's Internet experienced a fast development and attracted a lot of attentions. The information provided by "The Complete Reference to China/Chinese Related Web Sites" helped English-speaking people understand what were going on with China's Internet. Medias introduced "The Complete Reference to China/Chinese Related Web Sites" or use it as their reference sites.

South China Morning Post"Mr. Huang designed and maintains the Complete Reference to China/Chinese Web Sites, one of the best places to start a search if you have a fast modem. This enormous database has more than 500 direct links to mainland-related Web sites on virtually every topic", reported by South China Morning Post on December 12, 1996.

CNN   The popular web sites, such as CNN and C-Span, linked to the site on their web sites as their reference site (Please see who links to us).
C-SPAN

In February 1997, Aweto (China) was found in Tianjin, the third largest City in China as Aweto Company had been seeking further development of the site into China.

In order to make the site the best on the Internet, Aweto Company acquired the easy-to-remember domain name "ChinaSite.com" in January 1999. The whole site was redesigned based on the comments made by users. The site's name changed to "ChinaSite.com: The Complete Reference to China/Chinese Related Web Sites" as you see now.

China Youth Daily
  Fang Zhou Zi, a well-known author in the Chinese communities on the Internet, introduced the ChinaSite.com (in Chinese Language) on the May 31, 1999's issue of Computer Weekly of  China Youth Daily.

  Los Angeles Times' web site recommends ChinaSite.com in its Pick for October 1999 and said "Though ChinaSite boasts more than three thousand links, it is remarkably user-friendly and well-organized.". 

The Chinese language version of  ChinaSite.com, developed by Aweto (China), is close to finish and will release soon.

ChinaSite.com now is seeking further investment and cooperation opportunities to development the site into the largest and best portal and E-Commerce site in Chinese Internet market. Should you further questions, please feel free to contact us.
 

  How popular is the ChinaSite.com ?

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Please see our Site Analysis.

The top 5  pages on the site are:

  Why is the ChinaSite.com so popular?

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  1. ChinaSite.com is the best!
  2. It is easy to use. Users can find what they want by the second page-view on the site.
  3. It has the subjective "star-rating" to indicate how attractive a site is and whether the site is worth your time to visit. The "Star-rating" saves visitor's time and make it very easy to find the best sites.
  4. It is comprehensive. You can find almost everything regarding China here. About China, you name it, we have it!.
  5. It is updated almost everyday. 
  6. It has an easy to remember domain name "ChinaSite.com".
  7. The site is organized by user goals. The site is not scientifically categorized, but it is more user friendly. We categorized web sites based on "most-people think in this way" instead of "textbook said in that way" or "Yahoo's Way".
  8. People just like it, a lot of people link to us from their homepage. Please see Who link to us.
  Who visit the ChinaSite.com ?

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  Who owns and maintains the ChinaSite.com ?

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Aweto.com (Advanced Web Topology Company) in Chicago, Illinois. US.