New website for foreigners in Taiwan

What’s this? They don’t even list Alleycat’s on their restaurants list!

:stinkyface:

It looks great and has some fabulous resources, but it is waaaaay too Taipei centered.

“But before you decide to purchase a car think carefully of the disadvantages involved: Finding parking in Taiwan is harder than finding a needle in a haystack.”

Finding parking places is difficult in Taipei, but in other places, especially small towns, parking a car is not so difficult.

or this:

“Carefour, Tesco and Geant are the leading supermarket chain stores.”

Actually, RT Mart (Da Run Fa) has a lot more stores than Tesco. Taipeicentricism again! I’d love to …

“… make your way to either Costco or 101’s supermarket.”

Sure. Except that Costco and 101 can’t be found in Taichung or anywhere outside of northern Taiwan, save for Kaohsiung. Your discussion also leaves out wet markets (traditional markets) which do about 6X the business of supermarkets and volume retailers, and have better quality food on the whole, especially meats. They are also more fun to shop in. On the other hand, the “what to eat” section is really great., and so are the resource pages on hotels, museums, bookstores, and similar. Nice forrmatting too.

Your discussion of apartments focuses too heavily on Taipei. Foreigners outside of Taipei, especially long-termers, often live in houses (we have a nice 100+ ping house that we rent for 10K a month, with a yard and three large dogs.) You don’t seem to clearly state that there are alternatives to living in expensive, crowded Taipei.

Etc. It’s a really promising start and I shall certainly link to it – but it needs to cover the whole island. Taipei is really different from the rest of Taiwan. Basically, if you have only been to Taipei, you have never been to Taiwan.

Also, there is too much text proportionally. It needs to be broken up with more pictures or with clever formatting. The banners are really great, though. You might consider rotating background colors or something similar. But who am I to talk? It’s taken me years to get anywhere with the formatting of my website. sigh

Vorkosigan

Content takes a long time to create. It’s a start …

Thanks for your replies!

I have a much better idea of what to work on next.
We’ll try to do more translation pages, add whatever restaurants we missed and try our best to make this website info4tw and not info4tp.

Up to now we haven’t found a lot of information on other cites in Taiwan.
The lack of information on other cities was not due to egocentricity but rather limited resources.

We would be glad to include, research, document and learn more about life in all of TAIWAN.

Any suggestions and info would be appreciated, as we live in Taipei and might not find all the hot spots around the island apon first stumbeling into a new city.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions!
It was helpful to read your replies.

By the way-I’m an old-timer (I mean) long-timer my self.

Great job!!

I especially like the food-translation section, but I agree with Such-a-FOB, that you should indicate tones for the pinyin (although I’d go with tone-marks rather than tone-numbers, not that it makes a huge difference). Overall, I’d say so far, so good. I’m not actually in Taiwan yet (i’m coming in a month or so, most likely), so in the near future, I might have more suggestions for the web-site from the perspective of a true new-comer. And by the way (if you didn’t know this), Vorkosigan is Michael Turton, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to foreigner-in-Taiwan web-sites.

For any info that you would like us to add to the site, suggestions and so on can be mailed to info@info4tw.

Thanks again for your support, positive feedback and suggestions! :slight_smile:

No outing Indiana Jones, or you’ll end up in Maoman’s Temple of Doom :wink:

[quote=“Vorkosigan”]“But before you decide to purchase a car think carefully of the disadvantages involved: Finding parking in Taiwan is harder than finding a needle in a haystack.”

Finding parking places is difficult in Taipei, but in other places, especially small towns, parking a car is not so difficult.

[/quote]

Not correct… imho. I go to Taipei for work about 10 working days a month and never have many problems finding parking. After all there are many pay parking areas dotted all over the place apart from the legal street parking.

It’s much better now than when I lived in Taipei before. Perhaps you should have been there from 1988 - 1994

[quote=“Satellite TV”][quote=“Vorkosigan”]“But before you decide to purchase a car think carefully of the disadvantages involved: Finding parking in Taiwan is harder than finding a needle in a haystack.”

Finding parking places is difficult in Taipei, but in other places, especially small towns, parking a car is not so difficult.

[/quote]

Not correct… imho. I go to Taipei for work about 10 working days a month and never have many problems finding parking. After all there are many pay parking areas dotted all over the place apart from the legal street parking.

It’s much better now than when I lived in Taipei before. Perhaps you should have been there from 1988 - 1994[/quote]
Must agree with this. Parking in Taipei is seldom a problem once you figure out where the good spots are. I can’t think of anywhere I go in the city where parking is difficult. Free parking is not so easy to find but still usually do-able.
Compared with when I started using a car here in the early 90s and it was common to have to park so far away that you had to then take a taxi to where you actually wanted to go.