My colleagues and I had an ambitious idea: create a news portal for the Kaliningrad region. It was perfectly clear the old website was no longer delivering the required result. It caused a lot of issues: too much content crammed onto the home page, bad mobile experience, very slow loading times, it wasn't fit for content other than news, etc.

We made a 30 page requirement specification and starting looking for a web studio. This was a pretty interesting thing to do, as we discovered a top list of Russian web developer companies. We opened each company's website and browsed through the portfolio. This way, we narrowed the list down to about 20 companies. After 2 weeks of negotiations we decided to stick with JetStyle from Yekaterinburg.

Initially, we decided that it will be the news page whose layout determines the design of everything else. It took us two months of trial and error to build it. And that was cool. We were receiving a new photo collage for the news page each day. It resembled one made of plasticine for Yandex Pochta, but this one was from cardboards penciled with color pencils. We looked into website metrics data and made changes accordingly, moving assets up or down on the news page. Finally, we tried about 25 different layouts. You can see the final one live at our website.

After that, our progress has paced up a lot. In about 6-7 months we had everything designed and the front end almost completely implemented. I want to note that klops.ru has become a mobile responsive website. Kommersant.ru launched around summer 2013 and boasted its responsiveness, and in 3 months we have actually become the second Russian news media outlet with responsive design.

That's a small story about us designing and developing the front end together with JetStyle. Working with them was a very rewarding experience. It was both very easy and exciting. It was such a symbiosis of ideas and solutions that has an immense value. We are very grateful to the JetStyle team, they are real professionals. We are very happy it all went that way