As of today, my website is officially live! The website's domain name is yoyopro.org, and my website will immediately appear if you type yoyopro.org into chrome. It's an exciting feeling to have my own website! I also have my videos posted on youtube under my Jeremy Mahoney account. The French videos will likely not be visible for at least several hours, because they are still uploading. Once the French videos are visible, the first version of my website will be officially complete! I may well decide to add more videos to the website throughout the summer based on how many people end up being interested in the site.
The biggest way in which I deviated from my original plan is that my website currently only has tutorials in English, Spanish, and French, not Chinese as well. I originally planned to include Chinese videos, but I decided against including Chinese videos for several reasons. For one thing, it would be very difficult to get a significant Chinese speaking audience with the resources I currently have available. The Chinese-speaking online market is dominated by China's state-run browser: BaiDu. In fact, 90% of the world's Chinese language internet searches are carried out through BaiDu. The issue is that a website must be hosted in China to be visibly listed in BaiDu, and hosting a website in China requires either a connection to somebody who lives in China who has access to extra server space, or plenty of extra money to pay a Chinese web hosting company. As a foreigner, hosting a website in China, Hong Kong, or a nearby East Asian location with good speeds is often considerably more expensive than hosting a website within one's own country. There is also an extensive series of legal hoops to jump through to get approved to host a website in China, which would take a minimum of several weeks and many hours to complete. In addition, I realized that my Chinese level isn't quite high enough yet for me to produce high quality translations of yoyo tutorials. Yoyo tutorials involve complex language with plenty of precise prepositions, and I need to spend more time studying Chinese before I'm capable of commanding this complex language with fluency. Due to my currently insufficient Chinese language abilities and the difficulty of reaching Chinese-speaking populations, I decided that it would be best for me to focus on creating tutorials in just English, Spanish, and French. I'm proud of what I accomplished during this independent study! As far as I know, yoyopro.org currently has one of the internet's best collection of beginner yoyo tutorials in Spanish. (I haven't been able to find much Spanish stuff out there!) There are slightly more French resources and significantly more English resources already online, but it's still valuable to add more resources in each of these languages. I think my abilities in many areas, including website building, translation, oral language presentation, and multimedia production have significantly improved as a result of this experience. I'll certainly be monitoring my website and youtube channel in the coming weeks, and I'd be delighted to virtually interact with anyone who needs help with tricks!
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