Web development issues in the middle lane

Is it easy to have a complicated website not in a big city like Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in a province like Tula? We talked about this with Evgeny Ryzhkov, the CEO of OOO Program Verification.

- Hi Zhenya! Tell me what you and your company do in a nutshell?
- We are developing, promoting and selling our own software product PVS-Studio . Since we are in a Russian province, and more than 50% of sales are in the US, it is clear that we attach great importance to the website. And during our life I have accumulated a lot of things about the problems of the web industry. So now I will express it all :-).

- What state do you think the web development market is today: clean, rolling, incomprehensible, professional, or vice versa?
- Unfortunately, we have not grown to the Moscow web development market, for sure Moscow web studios are cool. But as for the provincial market - it's terrible. If you need a site a little more complicated than a site of a travel agency with 10 pages, then you have a problem. For example, we have about a thousand pages on viva64.com with unique (really unique) text - it seems that no one is developing such sites in the city. All the developers with whom we spoke, said: "It is very difficult, they do not do that." Rather, everyone gladly took it, but then it turned out that nothing worked.
In the end, we had to start a full-time web developer and make (and then maintain) a website on our own.
')
- Proposals to make a "rollback" or enter into informal relations from customers come?
- As I said, most of our clients are in the US, and this is not accepted there, or it is inconvenient to discuss slippery topics via the Internet. But we have never heard anything from Russian clients about kickbacks. If people need a product, then they come and just buy. So it is quite possible to live without kickbacks. As for kickbacks, this is Navalny, he is a specialist.

- Zhenya, I wanted to talk to you about the staff. How is your Tula with frames? How do you find employees in your company?
- I think the situation with personnel is like everywhere else. Adequate people are always few. And not only in Tula, but also in Moscow. And even the cool name of the company (I'm certainly not talking about myself, but about “Lebedev Studio,” for example) does not save the situation. For example, on the website developed by them for VTB24, it is possible to choose an office for issuing a bank card. Previously, everything was fine, but some reckless fellow redid it. And now it is impossible to choose a city - everything in one list:

That is, if I want to get a card in the city of Tula in the office of "On Lenin", I must look for it in the list of several hundred points. It is clear that the person who did this is just the same. And neither the salary nor the position could not help him do it well. So I do not think that the problem is only in the city. Adequacy is not enough, and there is a lot of devil-may-care attitude.

So when choosing employees for ourselves, we, first of all, try to look at the overall adequacy, and not at the knowledge of any specific keywords.

- How do you qualify employees in the average market? Enough for work or some things you want to improve?
- For sites of tour firms there is enough qualification, but for complicated sites it is already gone. And I think this is more a problem than even people, but in general the web development industry. After all, even Microsoft has jambs with sites like this (the program is typed "in a column"):



It seems to me that just the web industry is still young enough and has not learned to work in it at least in the same way as in the field of desktop applications. Still, in desktop programs there are no such errors that the text is displayed vertically in a column.
As for improvements, I would like people to take a little more responsibility on themselves, check what they are doing, and do not think: “And that-a-a-a-a will come down ...”

- We recently conducted a study with RAEC. They polled 2,000 specialists in the web development market. The result is such an infographic. Can you comment on it somehow? What agrees with what not?
- Some aspects are not clear to me, but I definitely agree with the market's non-professionalism. However, I think that this is a problem for the entire industry, and not only for the Russian market.

The story of life. When they were doing the current design for their site, the first version turned out to be very beautiful, correct from the point of view of smart design books (probably), but ... it didn’t fit at all. Since there was a lot of attention paid to beauty, but it was necessary to ease of use and clarity. Fortunately, together with the designer, after several exchanges, we were able to develop a successful solution.

- What are you and your projects doing to make the web development market more civilized?
- Banal words about “doing for the client, but not for robots” filled the edge with all, but this does not cease to be correct. We try to make a website for a person who has a problem and wants to solve it. In this case, you have to do much more than for a simple site. For example, we regularly check the viability of external links on our website, wrap them in our own redirection system so that when publishing articles on other resources we can quickly fix a broken link. It is clear that not all types of sites are suitable for this, but if a company needs a website that customers can use, then it is necessary to take into account the opinion of customers, not seo-shnik. Another funny example of how seo-shnik disfigure the Internet.



Here you are looking for Google "skating rinks in Tula." And it seems that you even find ... But some seo-shniki decided that if the text “600 words” FIVE TIMES to write “rollers in Tula” and even bold, then there will be a super-mega-seo effect. I will not hide, since I was on this page, then it is possible that the effect was. But as soon as I see in the text of several paragraphs five times the same expression in bold, I immediately understand that it was all a seo-shnik for robots, and not for me. And it makes no sense to read the text.

- Zhenya, is your wish in one phrase for the whole web development market?
- Make sites so that they are comfortable for people-visitors, not robots. All for a man!