Category: 生意­ / Business

Sorry, Taiwan Is Closed

As of right now, every city and county government has announced that businesses and schools will be closed tomorrow. I closed my restaurants early tonight at 8pm and we will decide tomorrow when to re-open for business. It is too early to tell when it will be safe for our staff and customers to open.

Meanwhile I’ve managed to get almost complete translations up on my English version of official business and school closures. The exceptions are notes 3 and 4 at the bottom which are atrocious run-on sentences I can’t quite wrap my head around in understanding. They don’t seem to be terribly important though from what I can understand of them. 3 is about who is affected by the closure notices and 4 seems to be about whether or not the time off is paid or will require make-up work. My translator fetches a copy of the official page every ten minutes and rewrites it and posts it on my web server. Pretty neat for a quick hack.

The current forecast has the typhoon cutting across the center of Taiwan but the storm is big enough that it will probably affect all of Taiwan. The eye should cross over the east coast tomorrow morning at 8am and exit on the west coast around 5pm. So there’s a good chance that we’ll be stuck at home all of tomorrow unless the storm weakens after making landfall. Right now things are very quiet in Taipei. “The calm before the storm.”

Web application development (Part 2)

Thanks for all the great feedback on my previous post. I had previously wondered why I don’t get a lot of comments on my posts and I think I’ve discovered why. I haven’t been making postings that were nerdy enough for my readership. Well, I guess I’ve learned my lesson.

I got a lot of good advice about using Drupal, CakePHP and Rails. I also got some offline advice to look into another PHP framework called Symfony. Symfony has one good thing going for it in that it has a book out which is available locally, which isn’t something any of the other PHP frameworks have going for it. (Drupal has at least one book available locally and Rails has at least a dozen.)

Anyways, after weighing all the good suggestions, I gave a stab at learning CakePHP. I found a few good tutorials online, probably the best of which is Sitepoint’s article The CakePHP Framework: Your First Bite. I combined that with a couple of other tutorials and within a couple of hours had an application with basic user authentication working. It really was pretty easy.

Today I worked on setting up the modeling for my first web application. I want to have a system where I can enter the hourly sales breakdowns from our daily receipts to come up with a schedule predictor of how many staff should be on duty at what times. SUBWAYâ„¢ has a way to do this but it involves employees writing information on dead trees and the manager to calculate by hand this data weekly. Much easier to just enter the raw numbers from the Z-Tape receipt each day and have it calculate things for me.

So I’ve finished modeling the four database tables needed and their relationships, and have entered some basic data with scaffolding. I think the modeling is pretty much set at this point and I can start building the controllers and views.

All in all it’s been fairly easy to get to this point and already I can see all the work that’s needed to get this complete. It’s quite possible I’ll have a working application by tomorrow and can bring the results to my manager at our weekly meeting on Wednesday.

Better yet, as soon as I get the authentication framework a bit more robust I can get my manager access and have her do the weekly data entry and set the employee scheduling herself. And the eventual goal is to get everything we do now in Excel and E-mail to be done via web applications.

Web application development

I’m looking for some advice from my readers. I’m looking at developing some web applications to support my business. A lot of it will be data entry that will be saved in a database and then some simple data processing done to the data. I will also need multi user access with authentication and authorization functions.

My server is currently LAMP based: Debian 4, PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2.2. So a solution built around this platform would be easiest to implement, and I also have basic PHP coding skills.

Here are some of the options I’m considering:

1) Roll my own application from scratch based in PHP. More work, but more flexibility and less learning.

2) Install Drupal or some other CMS and build modules. Will get a nice CMS too but need to learn a bunch of stuff and the type of apps I need to make will still require significant effort.

3) Use some kind of PHP Rapid Development Framework. Again, this will require more learning, but again has the flexibility of not being tied to a particular CMS’s requirements. But then the question is which one? CakePHP, Prado, Horde?

4) Switch over to Ruby on Rails which is supposedly the easiest way ever invented to code web apps. Means installing and learning a new platform and language from scratch.

5) Something else?

Any ideas or feedback?

US Trip

Today Maggie and Emily are going to the US to stay with my Dad in Santa Barbara for two weeks. I’m not going because someone needs to stay and make sure my business is running smoothly. The last two times I left (Singapore and US) a significant amount of money went missing each time. We now have video surveillance systems in place in both stores but I’m still a bit nervous about leaving again until I’m more confident that things are OK. Besides I also have a lot of things on my TODO list that I can get done once things are a bit quieter.

New Product Test

We’re starting a product test of baked potato wedges. A couple other stores are in on the test which have started already or will start soon. The different stores are using different prep methods to test which are operationally easier and result in the best product. The method we use is one I came up with.

We started this afternoon at my Xingtian Temple Restaurant. We start with fresh potatoes, topped with a special blend of spices and then baked in our bread oven. When ordered they are toasted in the high-speed oven. A small serving is $20 and a large serving (double size) is $35. They can optionally be topped with a specialty sauce, cheese and/or bacon for an additional charge.

Because this is a test we may not be able to make it available consistently at all times in the beginning while we try to figure out the demand for the product and work through operational issues of how to prep the product. When things are going smoothly at the Xingtian Temple Restaurant, we’ll start serving this at my Qingcheng Restaurant. Please don’t be disappointed if you find it unavailable when you come in.

I’m pretty excited about this. Our snack sales are pretty low because the bagged chips and cookies aren’t very popular with Taiwanese customers. We’ve had a pretty good response to the potato wedges so far, though it is very early. Besides that though, I had a small serving with cheese and bacon to test it myself and it was quite yummy.

Another promotion we are testing which I mentioned on Forumosa but not here is allowing meal discounts with 12″ sandwiches and salads (previously only available with 6″ sandwiches in Taiwan). This is also being tested at a limited number of stores, including both my restaurants.

Email marketers need to make change of address process easy

I’ve been trying to consolidate the email addresses I use to get away from using tagged addresses. This involves changing my email address on a lot of company email lists. While almost every newsletter and marketing email now has an easy and quick unsubscribe option at the bottom of every mail, few offer an easy change of address function, and many make it nearly impossible.

There are of course a few exceptions, those that make it quite straightforward to change your email address. With others I’m able to use the unsubscribe function and then go back to subscribe the new address on their web site.

But then there are the others. The worst seem to be those associated with magazine subscriptions. They often require you to enter a subscriber ID from the address label on the latest issue of the magazine just to get into the ‘customer service’ area and even then not all of them even have an option to change the email address. There are also a few sites where you use your email address as login name, but there is no obvious way to change the address.

Honestly guys, a lot of these newsletters and such I could easily do without. If I need to spend more than a couple of minutes to figure out how to change my address, I’ll just hit unsubscribe and be done with it. And you’ve just lost access to someone you might have sold something to later.

The solution is simple: down at the bottom of every email you send out, just below your ‘unsubscribe’ link, put a ‘change of address’ link too. On the linked-to page, ask for the new email address and then change it. Don’t ask me for my subscriber ID, my mother’s maiden name or my shoe size. Just my new email address.

Back from Singapore

Actually, I was back on Wednesday night, but was busy with catching up with weekly paperwork and such. The meeting was really nice and I think we got a lot of things accomplished. If even a few things are actually followed through in, there will be a lot of good to come in the next few years. I got to meet a lot of nice people, including the Singapore regional HQ staff which I usually only talk with by email or sometimes by phone. Also plenty of good food and drink as well.

Quick Up-to-dates

So, I passed the written part of the driving test. Still working on the road test parts. Before you laugh at me, go back and review those videos of the test in the last post.

Sunday April 1, we went by High Speed Rail to Tainan for early Tomb Sweeping for my great-grandfather-in-law, grandmother-in-law, and father-in-law. Instead of 5 hours by bus, it was about 1:45 hours on the HSR. I had to give driving directions to Maggie’s father’s grave since she never remembers. I had fried fish soup for lunch (everyone else had other stuff).

In the afternoon we headed to Kending by bus via Gaoxiong. HSR doesn’t go further than Gaoxiong and the bus to Gaoxiong was faster anyways, since the HSR stations are far outside of downtown in both Gaoxiong and Tainan. In Kending we stayed at the Chateau Hotel which was right on the beach. We went a short walk into town for dinner where we sampled night market fare and had some Thai food.

Tuesday we spent all day hanging out on the beach or in the pool.

Wednesday the weather turned cold again but it was still just warm enough in the sun to enjoy the beach a bit more until we had to make our way back home. We took the bus back to Gaoxiong and stopped off at the Liuhe Night Market where I again had my favorite fried fish soup. The Liuhe Night Market place makes it best, even though the Tainan one is supposedly more authentic. Then we took the train up to the HSR station and then back to Taipei on the express train in just 1:40 instead of 6 hours by bus.

Weather has been pretty crappy in Taipei since then. That and the real Tomb Sweeping 4-day holiday of Thursday, April 5 through Sunday April 8 really put a dent in business. Things have been slowly warming up though, so that and some sunny weather should be good for business. Please! Please!

Last night Emily was playing around and dropped a heavy 10 meter metal tape measure square on her big toe and busted the toenail. Lots of blood and drama but she seems to be OK today.

Next week I’m going to Singapore April 15 though April 18 for a Subway meeting. My flight on Sunday leaves 7:40am which means leaving the house at 5:00am. And since the buses aren’t running that early, that also means hiring a taxi to go to the airport. Ugh, too early.

I’m still hoping to make it back to the US at the end of this month. In related news, I’ve finally got the majority of my stuff off of tcp.com and onto my hosting accounts. I just may be able to get the last remnants off by the end of this week.

I also finally got the finalized versions of the VIP discount cards done for my shop, both English and Chinese versions. I found a nice heavy stock green paper that’s a bit lighter than “Subway Green” but pretty nifty looking. Microsoft Word has some decent Business Card Templates that I was able to use for layout, and they even have the ‘A4 sizes’. I got a small laminating machine, business card sized lamination sleeves, a small paper cutter and rounded corner snippers. I tried printing on my laser printer at home, but the toner tends to flake off the rough surface of the heavy stock paper I got. The HP inkjet printer at the restaurant works great though, and once printed, cut, and laminated they look really nifty.

For any of my readers in Taiwan, if you’d like a discount card, email me your mailing address (Chinese preferred) and let me know if you’d like the English or Chinese version and what name you’d like on it.

Online Marketing

I’ve started doing some online marketing through Google Adwords. Those of you in Taiwan may see ads for my restaurants show up on Google searches for various keywords. I’m not really sure how effective this will be at getting customers in the doors, but it’s not terribly expensive.

Google Adwords is pretty nifty in the amount of control you can get over your ads. You can restrict things to a particular geographic area. Over here the most I can narrow things down to is all of Taiwan, though I’d prefer to limit it to just Taipei City. They don’t have that option here, but in the US and some other countries you can narrow down the advertising to as small an area as a city block.

The system works via a bid system where you tell how much you are willing to pay and then it will show your ad or not depending on who else is bidding on the keywords you want. There don’t seem to be a lot of other people advertising in Taiwan, at least not for the keywords I’m using, so bid rates are quite low to get even top placement.

You can even do nifty things like display different ad versions depending on which language the browser is set to use, so I can target different ads to Chinese or English speakers, which I do. And they even have a tool that will suggest based on your current keywords what other keywords might be appropriate. This is great for me for the Chinese keywords since I would have to struggle to come up with other things besides the basics.

Anyways, it’s still unknown what effect this will have, but so far 329,874 people have seen my ads, 318 have clicked through, and traffic on my web site has gone up by a factor of 10.

There’s still a lot of work to do. I really need to reorganize my web site to make it easier to navigate and better organize the information. I should also work on building an email list of customers who want to get updated on new promotions, exclusive discounts, and new product news, as well as offer some kind of online coupon system. If anyone else has some ideas, I’d love to hear about it.

tcp.com shutdown reminder

For any tcp.com users who didn’t get the memo:

****************************** IMPORTANT ******************************

tcp.com is SHUTTING DOWN on February 28, 2007. You will need to
arrange other hosting service and move all your files and databases
before then.

See the wiki for more information:

http://wiki.jameslick.com/index.php/Tcp.com_shutdown

****************************** IMPORTANT ******************************