Problems of web development in the middle lane
We are engaged in the development, promotion and sale of our own software product PVS-Studio.Since we are located in the Russian province, and more than 50% of sales are in the USA, it is clear that we attach great importance to the website. And during our lifetime, I have accumulated a lot of things about the problems of the web industry.
Unfortunately, we have not grown up to the European web development market, for sure European web studios are cool. But as for the provincial market, it’s a horror. If you need a website a little more complicated than a 10-page tour agency website, then you have a problem. For example, we have on viva64.com about a thousand pages with unique (really unique) text – it seems that no one is developing such sites in the city. All the developers we talked to said: “It’s very difficult, they don’t do that.” Or rather, everyone was happy to do it, but then it turned out that nothing worked.
In the end, we had to get a full-time web developer and make (and then maintain) the site on our own.
most of our clients are in the USA, and there it is either not accepted, or it is inconvenient to discuss slippery topics via the Internet. But we have never heard anything about kickbacks from Russian clients either. If people need a product, they come and just buy. So it is quite possible to live without kickbacks. As for kickbacks, this is to Navalny, he is an expert.
I think the situation with personnel is the same as everywhere else. Adequate people are always few. And even the cool name of the company (of course I’m not talking about myself, but about Lebedev Studio, for example) does not save the situation. For example, on the website they developed for VTB24, there is an opportunity to choose an office for issuing a bank card. Everything used to be fine, but some crazy friend redid it. And now you can’t choose a city – everything is in one list:
That is, if I want to get a map in city x in the office, I have to look for it with my eyes in a list of several hundred items. It’s clear that the person who did it just doesn’t care. And neither the salary nor the position could help him do it well. So I don’t think the problem is only in the city. There is little adequacy, and there is a lot of disregard.
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.
There are enough qualifications for tour companies’ websites, but there are no more qualifications for complex websites. Moreover, I think this is rather a problem not even of people, but of the web development industry as a whole. After all, even Microsoft has jambs with sites like this (the program is typed “in a column”)
It seems to me that the web industry is simply still young enough and have not learned how to work in it at least as well as in the field of desktop applications. After all, there are no such errors in desktop programs that the text is displayed vertically in a column.
As for improvements, I would like people to take on a little more responsibility, check what they are doing, and not think: “And ta-a-a-a-k will do…”
Some aspects are not clear to me, but I definitely agree with the lack of professionalism of the market. However, I think this is a problem for the entire industry, not just the Russian market.
A life story. When we were doing the current design for our website, the first option turned out to be very beautiful, correct from the point of view of smart design books (probably), but … it didn’t suit us at all. Since there was a lot of attention paid to beauty, but it was necessary for ease of use and clarity. Fortunately, together with the designer, after several skirmishes, we were able to develop a successful solution.
Banal words about “doing for the client, not for robots” have filled everyone’s teeth, 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. At the same time, you have to do a lot more than for a simple website. For example, we regularly check the survivability of external links on our website, wrap them in our own redirect system so that when publishing articles on other resources we can promptly fix a broken link. It is clear that this is not suitable for all types of sites, but if a company needs a website that customers could use, then it is necessary to take into account the opinion of customers, and not seo specialists. Another funny example of how seo scammers are disfiguring the Internet.
Here you are looking for “ice rinks in the city of x” on Google. And it seems that you even find… But some SEO experts decided that if you write “ice rinks in the city of x” FIVE TIMES in a 600-word text and even highlight it in bold, then there will be a super-mega-seo effect. I will not hide it, since I was on this page, then perhaps there was an effect. But as soon as I see the same expression highlighted in bold five times in the text of several paragraphs, I immediately understand that I wrote it all seo-shnik for robots, and not for me. And there is no point in reading the text.