About Wonderfulmalaysia.com

Wonderful Malaysia mainly is a one-man-show though many travel enthusiasts are involved with the website. The website is not linked to Tourism Malaysia or to the Ministry of Tourism. It is a private initiative to promote this beautiful holiday destination. We spend hours a day delivering interesting content for travelers that plan to visit Malaysia. Should you come across any information that is not up to date; please provide us with some valuable feedback.

Note:
www.wonderfulmalaysia.com is not affiliated, associated, not in any business relationship with Ministry of Tourism Malaysia. Also, this website is NOT subsidized, funded, sponsored, endorsed, or officially approved by Ministry of Tourism Malaysia.

On this page:

About the webmaster

I am Ilya Houben from The Netherlands. Years ago I discovered Malaysia. My wife and I booked a standard trip to Penang, and weren't satisfied afterwards because we knew there was so much more to see. Two years later decided to head over there again, this time we visited more islands, cities and attractions. We 'fell in love' with the country, and although we still visit other countries, we visit Malaysia almost yearly. Many years ago I made a Dutch travel website about Malaysia called Veelzijdig Maleisie (which roughly translates to Versatile Malaysia). This website grew to be one of the most popular Dutch travel websites about Malaysia. In 2007 I decided to build a new English website about Malaysia; Wonderful Malaysia. Work progressed slowly at first, I started writing and translating content in 2008. In 2009 we moved to Malaysia which was great as I now could spend even more time building and maintaining both websites. We currently live in a fairly new area in KL called Bangsar South.

The Team

We wouldn't be able to publish this much content without the help of numerous people. For the main content and articles Wonderful Malaysia uses many freelancers that write for us. Besides that many travelers supply us with content, photographs and videos from their trips through Malaysia.

The following people played their part in building this website:

• Michael Friedrichs - Freelance - Translations
• Andrew Wong - ZHNG Design Studio- Coding, designing
• Anne Verbist - Freelance (oDesk) - Translations
• Paul van der Laken - VDL Vertalingen - Translations
• Raj - ByZeal - Logo design
• K. MacDougall - Freelance - Translations
• Zowik Abramov - Freelance - Video intro
• Dirk van Blokland - Freelance - Flash banner sets
• Lyanna Tujang - Freelance (oDesk) - Contributor, writer
• Marijke van den Hamer - Freelance (oDesk) - Translations
• Aian R.D. - Freelance (oDesk) - PDF publishing, pdf cover design
• Jaco van Duivenboden - Freelance - Scripts

The Title & Domain

I could have chosen to translate the title directly from the Dutch title to the corresponding English title. However, we felt that that name wasn't too easy to pronounce. When I would capture the website and the overall country, I could only think of 'Wonderful Malaysia' so I claimed www.wonderfulmalaysia.com in 2007. Of course a website title like www.malaysia.com or www.malaysia.asia would have been great, but these domains are almost impossible to grab (mainly due to the high price for such domains). Wonderfulmalaysia.com is easy to pronounce, recaptures all elements of the country, and is fairly easy to write down or remember. In the end I felt the title was great for a travel website about Malaysia.

Logo

After some online searches I came into contact with Raj, a great designer from Singapore. He designed the logo exactly how we envisioned it. I also got in touch with Hasrimy; a designer from Malaysia. He was selling one of his entries for a Tourism Malaysia 2007 contest. We bought this logo too and we had our Dutch website visitors decide on which we would use on the website. In the end we chose Raj's design.

Design

For the design we relied on the services of ZHNG Design Studio from Kuala Lumpur. ZHNG Design Studio is actually a small WordPress specialist studio. We already had quite some great experiences with owners Andrew Wong and Kathie Wiehanne as they had designed my blog wegopro.com about internet marketing (they also run WP website SimplyWP.net). They came up with this fabulous tailor made design for Wonderful Malaysia.

Content

Although this website is still fairly young, the content is based on years of experience. Nothing on this website is borrowed from others; all content has been written by us and our freelance writers. Most of the content was translated from Dutch to English by numerous translators. During my stays in Malaysia I always bring my laptop with me. This makes it easy for me to check all content, to adjust, alter or delete particular pieces of information. At the same time I try to write down new content in order to keep this website growing (in order to make sure it gets more popular).

Subscribe now to never miss a post!
Subscribe to our email updates or the RSS feed, right now!

Highlights

• Cameron Highlands
• Danum Valley
• Kinabatangan River
• Lake Kenyir
• Royal Belum State Park
• Taman Negara
• More highlights...

Islands

• Langkawi
• Mataking
• Penang
• Perhentian
• Redang
• Tioman
• More islands...

Cities & Towns

• Georgetown
• Kota Bharu
• Kota Kinabalu
• Kuala Lumpur
• Kuching
• Malacca
• More cities...