Wondering why I suddenly started building websites? Check out this article — it’s because Hostinger’s hosting is just too cheap.
One of the first questions I kept asking myself while building websites was simple:
What do people outside China actually want to know about Chinese culture?
Not what I think they should know.
Not what a textbook says they should know.
What do they actually search for?
That question eventually led me to build ChineseFortuneTools.
Why Chinese fortune and culture?
Chinese culture has an enormous amount of curiosity built around it.
People search for things like:
- Chinese zodiac signs
- Chinese New Year
- Chinese zodiac compatibility
- Chinese lucky numbers
- Feng Shui
- BaZi
- Chinese lunar calendar
- Lucky dates
- Chinese festivals
- Traditional Chinese symbols
Some people take these traditions seriously.
Others are simply curious.
And many people are somewhere in between.
That makes this an interesting area for a website experiment.
Instead of creating another article that simply explains what the Chinese zodiac is, I wanted to build something more interactive.
Tools.
A visitor should be able to enter something, click something, calculate something, or discover something.
That is the basic idea behind ChineseFortuneTools.
From articles to tools
This is one of the things I have learned while experimenting with AI-assisted website development.
A website doesn’t always have to answer a question with 2,000 words.
Sometimes a tool is much more useful.
For example, instead of reading a long explanation about Chinese zodiac signs, a visitor can simply enter a birth year and discover their zodiac animal.
Instead of reading about the lunar calendar, they can use a calendar tool.
Instead of reading a general article about lucky dates, they can explore dates for themselves.
That changes the relationship between the visitor and the website.
They are no longer just reading.
They are doing something.
Why I’m interested in this as a business experiment
ChineseFortuneTools is not just a cultural project.
It is also an experiment in SEO and online business.
The interesting part is that many Chinese culture topics have thousands of different search intents.
Someone searching for “Chinese zodiac” has a very different intention from someone searching for “Chinese zodiac 2027,” “Chinese zodiac compatibility,” or “what is my Chinese zodiac.”
One broad topic can therefore become many useful tools and pages.
But I don’t want to build hundreds of pages just because I can.
The goal is to build something that people would actually use.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important to me.
AI has made it incredibly easy to produce websites.
The difficult part is no longer:
Can I create another page?
The difficult part is:
Would anyone actually want this page?
ChineseFortuneTools is my traffic experiment
Of the websites I’m building, I see ChineseFortuneTools as one of my broader traffic experiments.
The audience can include people who are:
- interested in Chinese culture
- learning about China
- planning a trip to China
- studying Chinese
- interested in astrology and traditional beliefs
- looking for Chinese New Year information
- simply curious about their Chinese zodiac sign
And some of those people may eventually have other questions.
What does my Chinese name mean?
How should I behave when visiting China?
What gifts are appropriate?
What should I know about Chinese social customs?
Those questions lead to completely different projects.
And that’s where my other websites come in.
One website doesn’t have to answer every question
I’m gradually changing how I think about websites.
I used to think:
Build a website → get traffic → make money.
Now I’m starting to think:
Find a group of people → understand their questions → build useful products around those questions.
ChineseFortuneTools is one part of that experiment.
It starts with curiosity about Chinese culture.
Where that curiosity goes next is what I’m interested in discovering.
For now, I’m building, testing, watching the search data, and learning.
That’s what Ordinary Man Trying is all about.
I don’t know yet which website will become the biggest one.
I’m trying to find out.
Leave a Reply