Answers to questions about creating the main site of the country

Most recently, I announced a conference with Artem Geller on the creation of the kremlin.ru site. The conference was held on Wednesday (December 2). Everyone had the opportunity to ask Artem a question. The conference itself is available in our archive , and here I will post some of the most interesting questions and answers in my opinion.





Alexey Kolevatykh: Hello, Artem, tell me, how many sketches did you prepare before you got the final sketch, which later turned into a website? What are the features of demonstration and adoption of ekskizov at sites of such high national importance?
Artem Geller: Good afternoon, Alexey. If you answer in fact, then in the folder with the project 705 layouts in the .psd format, and the folder itself takes 1.5Gb. For a web project, this is a very large size.
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Due to the fact that the basic value in our case was dynamic information flows, we started developing layouts from the separate news page and only came to the main page closer to the end. This is rather unusual because, for the most part, website development starts from the main page.

It is important to note that even before the start of development, there was a carefully defined concept; moreover, preliminary layouts of iconic sections were created.

There were no features of demonstration and adoption of sketches; we simply worked in close cooperation with the press service of the President of the Russian Federation. Personal visits, files, mail, constant communication.


Yevgeny Kalmykov: Hi, Artem.
And why is the copyright on the most important website of the country not made according to GOST?
Joke :)
Artem, if you could start working on the project again, what would you do differently?
Artem Geller: Hi, Zhenya.
To begin, probably, it is necessary that I am satisfied with the result of the work. Work on the portal continues and if there are thoughts to do something new, then these thoughts find their realization. After all, the project is truly alive, both outside and inside.

I would also like to note that shortly on the President’s website there will be unannounced interesting and innovative functions and modules, the essence of which is to structure, simplify and make interactive work with certain types of information.


Alisa Nikolaeva: How many people worked on the project?
Artem Geller: Good afternoon, Alice. If we exclude the press service of the President, and take only technologists, programmers and designers, then approximately 10 to 15 people for 4.5 months.


Yevgeny Kalmykov: Artyom, the idea of ​​creating the site and how it should be - is this an initiative from above, or did you have a certain set of proposals?
Artem Geller: Good afternoon, Eugene.
Of course, the idea of ​​creating a website is an initiative from above, in response, we (OKB), among other companies, set forth our thoughts and made suggestions.
And I am glad that the design of the portal was done by me, because someone else could have done poorly.


Lyosha Ogonyov: How were the special versions of the site developed? Did you use any recommendations, such as WCAG, when developing the “version for the visually impaired”?
Artem Geller: Alexey, thank you very much for this question.
I will say that we thought about accessibility within the framework of all subsites.
Of course, we fully adhered to the standards and recommendations. Used their work in this area and the source:
National standard GOST R 52872-2007 “Internet resources. Accessibility requirements for the visually impaired ”, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - (from W3C) (international), Section 508 Standards - USA, WaSP - United Kingdom, DAL - Denmark.

The issue of accessibility has been studied even more widely. We read and analyzed websites created by people with disabilities, and websites created for people with disabilities, where there are really interesting discussions on the availability of this large part of active Internet users.
We have applied a new technology, born in England called zoom layout (http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/zoom/), this is a very good idea:

• Automatic content formatting;
• The set of columns becomes one column;
• Visually, navigation is simplified;
• The menu goes up;
• Fonts are increasing;

All this ensures maximum availability.

We went even further, in addition to the main color standards recommended by the standards, we introduced several additional ones that we learned about from specialized forums, i.e. from the original source.



Dmitry Zimin: Artem, hello! I wanted to ask a question for 404fest, but I did not have time. Question: were there any specific requirements that are not found on “normal” sites? For example, triple security level or some kind of multistage publishing system? And thank you very much for the site, now it is not a shame to foreigners.
Artem Geller: Hi Dim!
Thanks for the positive feedback, it's especially nice to hear from you :)

Security level was given absolute priority, but we were able to ensure a full level of work in these conditions. There were not big moments that had to be abandoned for security reasons, but they are not significant.

Yes, a multi-stage publication system has been created for the presidential press service of the Russian Federation, which is based on their wishes. I want to note once again that we are lucky to work with professionals, it is these people who work in the press service.

About conferences

Online conferences 404 are held every week. At the conference, you can ask questions to famous designers, programmers, project managers, etc. Questions are accepted during the week starting on Thursday, and the answers are shown on Wednesday of the next week.
Also, an archive of conferences with Alexander Savitsky (TM), Sergey Chikuenkom , Ilya Birman (Gorbunov Bureau) and many others was published on the site.
And on December 9 there will be a conference with Ivan Sagalaev , the head of the content services development group at Yandex.