lovemandarin.com

[Qiuyue]

What happened to that bookstore, with the friendly prices - it seems to be down?

[elina]

For some reason, we cannot use that domain name at present, but we use the name of http://www.studychineseculture.com/index.asp for our site currently. We have told this to our every customer, few of them have no longer used the email addresses registered on our site before, so there’re someone we cannot inform.

Thanks for your concern.

[Qiuyue]

I guess your rent of the domainname expired, i suggest you prolong it or get a new one rapidly!

And please change so that a new window isn´t opened everytime one clicks somweher on the site.

[elina]

I guess your rent of the domainname expired, i suggest you prolong it or get a new one rapidly!

It’s more complicated than that, we have been doing our best to make the change go smoothly, thanks for your suggestion!

And please change so that a new window isn´t opened everytime one clicks somweher on the site.

We always seriously consider each single comment from our every visitor. I understand your meaning. Let me tell you why we make our site open a new window everytime one clicks somewhere on the site. Before we design our site, usually we need to visit some sites and search/compare some products at the same time, and some sites always keep ONE window open, so we have to “后退/ back” on the Internet Explorer interface from time to time, we think it’s really 麻烦的/ troublesome to surf on that kind of sites. So we make our own site open a new window each time when clicking somewhere on the site, we do it on purpose and think it will give convenience to our customers. But we could be wrong. Any thoughts? From yesterday, we began to do some website program updating. If we’re sure it’s not necessary or even annoying, we can disable the function of “opening a new window”.

[eeraser]

I do not like web sites opening windows. If I make 30 clicks, that is 30 windows opening! I also comparison shop, so every time I need a new window, I SHIFT+click a link and this will open a new window. If you put a note telling users to SHIFT+click on a link to open a new window, it will be a better experience for your user.

PS - It is my first trip to your website and there are some great videos I will be ordering for the US.

[imron]

I think this is often a major design difference between Chinese and western websites. Chinese sites seem to like opening links in new windows, whereas western sites don't (at least not so much).

[elina]

I do not like web sites opening windows. If I make 30 clicks, that is 30 windows opening!

Now we understand it’s annoying in deed! We have changed and made a note on the homepage: “Please SHIFT+click on a link to open a new window if necessary”, hope those visitors who want to compare several products at the same time can notice the explanation.

Thank you very much for your valuable advices!

[Luobot]

On a given site, I like to open new windows as new tabs. Closing the browser window closes all the tabs at the same time. I think this is the best of both worlds, as I don't like clicking the back button and waiting for the page to reload. Must be the Chinese influence.

[elina]

Thanks, Luobot. I’m sorry, my English is not very good, I use 金山词霸 to look up new words. It says the meaning of “tab” is “制表符”, so I just cannot understand the Chinese meaning of this sentence: “I like to open new windows as new tabs. Closing the browser window closes all the tabs at the same time.”

[gato]

Tabs allows multiple websites to be displayed in the same window. The Firefox browser has always had it.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/tabs

Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7.0 also has it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx

They probably got the idea from the tabs on Amazon.com or like sites.

http://amazon.com/

[Luobot]

Elina,

Sorry I wasn’t being clear. I should have said, “tabbed browsing” rather than just tabs. Here are the Chinese characters that I found to say this: 选项卡浏览. I’m not sure if this is the generally used translation of “tabbed browsing” or just Microsoft’s translation for PRC simplified characters. For Taiwan, Microsoft uses: 索引標籤式瀏覽. Perhaps someone else knows if this is the current, commonly used, popular term. It seems like too much of a mouthful to me.

Fortunately, Gato provided an excellent explanation of what I was referring to. Just to be perfectly clear, if you look the graphic in Gato’s post, you can see 3 tabs open in the browser window.

From left to right, they are:

Cnn.com – Breaking news, U.S., World …

The New York Times – Breaking news, World …

WSJ.com – U.S. Home

When the [X] in the upper right hand corner of the window is clicked, then the entire browser window, including all 3 or 300 tabs, will close. This is a function of the browser rather than how your site is coded. Both Firefox and IE7 has this functionality. Since this is a feature of the browser, it’s not necessary to code your site any particular way. Whichever way you code it, the user can open links in a new “tab” of the same window rather than as an entirely new window. Then the user can easily move from one tabbed screen to the next and back without opening, closing, or reloading pages again and again. It’s a more efficient way of working, I think, and it’s probably why tabbed browsing is so popular that Microsoft felt compelled to copy it from Firefox.

However you decide to code your site, some will be unhappy with links that open in the same window, and some will be unhappy with links that open in a separate window, but you can tell users about tabbed browsing and that it will solve their problem either way. For anyone not familiar with tabbed browsing, I suggest just trying it out, and it will become quickly clear. For a free download of Firefox, see here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

(Full disclosure: I use Firefox and I recommend it over IE. )

[elina]

We use IE6.0 and have never used Firefox before. Yesterday afternoon we downloaded it from the link given by Gato. Today we had more time and began to learn it, many thanks to the patient and excellent teachers of Gato and Luobot, we understand it very fast.

At present we think our site is convenient for the following 3 kinds of people to surf:

1. visitors using IE6.0, if they want to open a link in the same window, other than in a new window, now it’s the situation on our site, but before our site opened a link automatically in a different new window.

2. visitors using IE6.0, if they want to open a link in a new window, SHIFT+click can do.

3. visitors using Firefox (or maybe IE7.0 judging from the above 2 posts, we have not learnt it yet), CTRL+click can let people open a link in a new tabbed browsing in the same window.

(Full disclosure: I use Firefox and I recommend it over IE. )

Going to love Firefox than IE for this “tabbed” characteristic, and maybe other advantages we still have not found.

[gato]

Going to love Firefox than IE for this “tabbed” characteristic, and maybe other advantages we still have not found.

Firefox doesn't give websites as much control over your computer as IE. Therefore, there's less of chance that bad programs (e.g. spyware) will infect your computer. However, many mainland websites are designed for IE 6.0 and may not work perfectly with Firefox or even IE 7.0. I use Firefox as my primary browser and keep IE around as a backup.

A great thing about Firefox is the ability to add features with "add-ons." One of the best add-ons for Firefox is "Scrapbook," which allows you to save web pages into organized folders (like you do with bookmarks), with an ability to search the saved pages easily.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427

ScrapBook

There are also many add-ons helpful to those learning languages such as these below for Chinese:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=chinese&status=4