Jewish.ru
Online-media about Jewish life, culture and history
Jewish.ru is the biggest Russian-language media dedicated to the history, ancient traditions and modern everyday life of Jews all over the world. Jewish.ru has been existing for 17 years. The number of its readers has recently started growing thanks to the efforts of the new editorial team. But the old site prevented the development of the project. The users were unhappy with unreadable font and the way the site had looked on the mobile devices. The journalists couldn't use modern online-media instruments because of limited functionality of the out-dated admin panel. The out-dated design reduced the depth of browsing the site. We've created an absolutely new site responding popularity and ambitions of Jewish.ru.
Firstly we've designed a new logo and suggested a new style based on two colours important for the Jewish tradition – that are blue and white. Then we've changed the structure of the site leaving seven sections instead of twelve, added convenient scrolling to the news feed and a feature that allows to look for news for a particular day.
While developing the site our team has solved several technological problems including the realization of a complex calendar with instant switching between Jewish and Gregorian versions. There's precise time of the beginning and the end of Shabbat in the city chosen by the user. Each Friday field in the calendar has got a link to a weekly chapter of Torah; all the holyday fields are linked to relevant materials.
We've made three types of publications: standard card for analytics, reports and stories and two special cards for interviews and personal columns.
All the stuff that had been accumulating for 17 years of existence of Jewish.ru has been automatically transferred to the new site. The materials were classified according to sections and genres. Besides the tag system was optimized: the redundant ones were removed (there had been somewhat about 5000 tags!) and the rest were divided into two groups: the most popular tags and those that are easily searched through the search field.
Alongside with building a desktop site for Jewish.ru our team has created certain mobile applications for Android and iOS for this media. Our aim was to make available all the materials from the old site through the mobile apps and to develop a number of exclusive mobile instruments.
Amongst available mobile instruments there're such commonplace ones as Bookmarks, and unique ones, such as Compass showing direction towards Jerusalem and Library with books for Jews and about Jews that can be bought online or downloaded for free. The main bonus of mobile apps is the Jewish Map showing kosher restaurants and canteens, Jewish museums, synagogues and community centres in the area. Users can add new objects and make lists of favs here – this stuff will be included into the common base of the Jewish Map after moderation.
