Thank you for visiting GetPowers.com.

This website was created and is maintained by Mark Powers (Me). This site allows me to share my interests, creative energy and have fun. At the same time, I hope it will help promote US - Chinese relations because I often use Chinese and English on many of my websites.

I have created several websites across the range of my interests. My goal is to create webpages that are interesting, interactive and fun. I also make websites for my friends such as Jace's Macabre Box of Short Stories and the all-new Lina Laoshi - Teaching Chinese in Singapore.

My translation business website can be found at Powers Translation Services, for the translation and proofreading of English and Far East Asian languages.

And finally, there is my Journal with pictures about my experience overseas.

My purpose for this project is for a win-win outcome. I can share my interests and others can enjoy it as well.  The Internet is truly a wonderful thing, it leverages the voice of one person to reach so many people. I wthank my family, friends, my host providers in two countries and Google, who I think makes great products. I sincerely hope that you find these websites interesting, useful, and fun.

The History of GetPowers.com

The GetPowers.com website was established in October, 2006. However, my first website started much earlier. I first learned how to make websites playing around while working at the office in Japan.

While in college in 2005, I took a class on building websites, which vastly improved my knowledge of how to create a website. I then designed a website for my father's photography business.

I was planning to go overseas to study in China. So I then launched a blog on Geocities in May, 2005 to stay in touch with family and friends and share my adventures overseas. I got a lot of positive feedback from friends, family, even former teachers, who liked to know about life overseas and what I was doing.

However, in 2006 I met a person who told me about Google's Adsense program. A way to monetize your website. Simply put, Adsense allows webmasters to put content-relevant ads on their websites and earn money.

I had always dreamed of finding a way to make money on the Internet. So this sent me into a frenzy trying to come up with ways to provide interesting content, attract visitors and earn money from the ads.

First I found a web host on FreeWebService.net and launched Powers.max.io. I quickly created a Learn English Website and a collaborative effort with my friend Jace to make a website featuring Jace's scary stories, called Jace's Macabre Box of Short Stories.

However, I discovered that even though that webhosting service was free, it was too slow, added its own ads to my websites, and did not offer enough features and space.

So I checked out Yahoo! Hosting which offered a free domain name lots of space and bandwidth for a reasonable price.

It was difficult to find a good name for his new website. Many of the .com website names were already taken. It was hard to find one that was original, easy to remember, and had some relation to me. After nearly two days of searching available website names, I was lucky enough to discover the Getpowers.com was available! After calling my family to see if they liked the name, the new website Getpowers.com was born.

I was soon at work creating the new website. The original design was based on a space theme. This imagery was symbolic of my belief that this website had unlimited possibilities and potential. The bright blue star was symbolic of my enthusiasm for the project.

Finally, I realized that the site needed to look better, offer more and interesting content, have greater interactivity and participation by visitors. Thus, the look of the site was changed to what you can see today.

Mark Powers

Mark Powers is currently residing in Beijing, China. His interests include culture and languages, health and fitness, philosophy, business and finance, and computers.
For more:  Interview with Mark