OGE & Internship Complete!

It is finally the last day of my internship and in less than 3 days I will be back in Toronto.  It was a stellar experience working abroad and a learned a lot about:

• starting a business in Hong Kong
• running a small business / startup company
• wi-fi and gadgets
• hotel management and the hospitality industry
• dealing with clients
• building and designing a website
• and much more…

Unfortunately my boss had to leave to Shenzhen, China yesterday so he was not here for my last day.  However, yesterday he sat down with me for what seemed like an hour where we talked about his business.

My boss is a veteran of the IT industry working in it since the first computer came out.  He has worked in places like IBM, AT&T and Juniper and he said because of those places he had learned a lot about the IT and Networking industry.  He has several business’ but DNET solution is a company that he is looking to make it with.  He only recently started the business, however he is moving in the right direction and he has a solid business plan.

He spoke a lot about his time at IBM where they trained him and gave him a lot of essential skills that he uses in developing DNET that he would have never gained in school.  This interests me since I have been curious about starting a business sometime in the near future.  He advised me in making sure to work in the industry first if possible to gain a better understanding about how it works and most importantly I can build a network of friends in that industry.  He said his network that he built during his time working was extremely valuable when he was starting his own business.

A great piece of advice he offered me was a few tips for starting a business.  Before you want to start your business you first need to figure out where this business will be in 2-5 years and what you want to do with it.  For example: do you want to create a product and try to get a bigger company to acquire your entire company and sell your IP and move onto the next idea or build your company for several years and aim for an IPO.  He also gave me a lot of advice on how to initially finance and build a proper budget for your business using some tips he learned at IBM.

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and I have made several contacts here in Hong Kong that I intend to keep in touch with.

Web Dev Update

So the website was completed and it is now live and available at : http://www.dnetsolution.com/

Earlier this week I said I would post at post mortem of sorts about my progress with developing this website since it was one of my main and largest tasks to do over this summer in comparison to the other things I have done.

I shall go into detail of each page individually:

Home Page

Home Page

The old home page had a lot of unneeded info on it and it made it a bit difficult to look at to understand exactly what DNET Solution is.  For my homepage I decided to strip it away and follow a really minimal approach to everything.

Home Page 2

For the rest of the homepage I highlighted the main product which was the Supermedia where DNet makes its main profit from.  For the footer, I also kept it simple by having a simple and sweet ‘about us’ statement and a few outgoing links to other DNet portals.

About Page

About Page

The about page defaulted to the Contact us subpage because I felt that it had the most important information to help a client reach DNET and a form to send us any email really quickly so the person would not have to load up their email.

Our Story is a small subpage with a bit of  a company blurb, nothing too fancy.  Gallery has a few pictures of DNet products and a nice lightbox display that fades the entire screen when you click each image as it opens up in full screen.

Also note that the subpages do not need to be loaded separately.  They were preloaded to make browsing faster since they all technically exist on the same page.

Product Page

Product Page

This page was really hard to do since the old version was super clunky.  I decided to stick with my minimal approach and remove a lot of hindrances and highlight all the products at the top with a collage, then have each product section at the bottom in an accordion that the user can click and interact with.  Rather then loading another page for each, I just placed each product neatly hidden in each button.

Product page, Accordion

The accordion works really nicely to hide each product neatly into the buttons and it allows for a very fast way to view each product. When you click on the other “Specification” button you are able to download the a data sheet for each product.

Download Page

Download Page

I didn’t want to keep this page, But I ended up having to since my boss was adamant about having a page to send his clients to, so they may download important documents about our products.

News Page

NEWS Page

I made this page entirely out of embedding a tumblr blog that I set up so that my boss did not have to keep updating the website when he wanted to make a change to the news section.  It feeds info from a DNET tumblr page and it auto updates with every new post.  It is a lot easier to use tumblr then to update a website, which is why I chose to do it this way.

Quote Page

Quote Page

Another really simple page that just allows a user to enter data into a form so that an email will be sent to the sales team to approach them.

 

Aside from that that is pretty much the website I built in about a week and a half.

Last Week at Science Park

At long last the internship is almost over.  This last week is going to be jam packed with last minute work and things to do.  For one I need to get the website live and uploaded onto the current DNet Solutions website.  It should not be very difficult to do that, the only thing I haven’t had time to test is the speed at which each web page loads.

For the current website, everything loads really slowly, but for this website, I took out a lot of unneeded photos and clunky boxes in favour for a more minimalist approach.  I’ll post another blog in the middle of the week talking more about the website, kind of like a post mortem.  For now here is a picture of the home page:

DNet Homepage Alpha

 

This is what the old Homepage used to look like:

Old DNet HomePage

I am still in the process of changing the header image because I would like to replace that with a slideshow. However I am still waiting on some pictures.

Overall this internship has been very rewarding.  I got to wear a lot of different hats during my time working here and it was my first time both working abroad and in a very small company.  I like how relaxed and homey it feels to work in a small company and most of the people here have known each other for many years.  I used to work in a much larger company where it was a lot more professional but it also felt very fake and it was not the right fit for me.  Working at DNet, I sit 3 seats away from one of the CEO’s and I can approach him whenever I want and we can strike up a conversation about many different things.  Working at SNCL I needed to walk half a floor away, knock on a door and choose my words carefully when I spoke to my boss who was always busy and the air in the room always felt very tense.

At DNet I feel like I can work at my own pace and I have a lot more control and freedom to do my work.  I am very glad that I had the opportunity to take part in an 8 week internship abroad and I would like to come back to Hong Kong in the future to do business.

Off to Boracay!

Everything Hurts!

Last week was a pretty short week where I spent most of my time working on the website.  I’ll post some screenshots this week so you can see exactly what I have been up to.  I have been using Adobe Muse to create the website through a recommendation of one of the Global edge students which was a breath of relief since it allowed me to make the website a lot faster then what I was doing before.  Adobe Muse allows you to simply and efficiently create a website without having to worry about creating the CSS sheets and doing any coding.  The real power comes from the ability to visually see your website and test in under 30 seconds.  Its a really great piece of software and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to build a website that wants to get it running in under a week.

Muse also has a great bunch of modules for creating a parallax scrolling version of your website and they have support for creating mobile and tablet versions of the website as well.  I wanted to created a parallax version of the website I was doing for DNET Solution, but I don’t think that is what my boss wants.  He spoke of creating a very simple and sleek version that someone can navigate through very easily.  It is proving to be a bit of a design problem more then anything.  Minimalism is a great design practice but its also very hard to do.  Often times I will stare at the same screen for about an hour while moving something 4 times to see what works better for a user to enter and where I want the focus points to be.

It helps that we do a bit of graphic design in our program otherwise I would have no idea as to what I am doing.