The Ukrainian Verein's site is live

By Georg Malahov

The working week is over, and its main result for me: the project for the Ukrainian Verein — the association of Ukrainians in Germany I've been building a site for — is done. There may still be some touch-ups, but on the whole, we opened the site to the public. Opened it, and that's it, people can use it.

At the end I fixed everything needed so the site lives for more than the people who already know the address: SEO tags, images, links, sharing on social networks. Plus I did something I'd never done before: the site now sends mail and documents itself, from its own technical address, replies land in the Verein's ordinary inbox, and everything sent can be tracked. A small thing, but a useful one for an association that runs on correspondence with its members and with the authorities.

The plan for the next few days: the site sits for a couple of days, the folks invite their users and give it a proper test, and then I submit it to Google for indexing. Down in the footer there's a link to me as the developer — we put that in the contract. That's the first thread of the cross-link network I'm slowly building between my projects: their site links to mine, mine will link to theirs. The stats on the site are running too, so it'll show whether people come and where from. Something to look at.

Now about the timing. In April, when the project was just starting, I was counting on closing it by the end of that month. The contract we signed on May 8 set a different marker — end of June. We opened in mid-July: about a month later than planned. There are reasons on both sides. On mine — the project sat in the queue with the rest of them the whole time, I put it on pause, I went on holiday. On the Verein's side — the content, as I already wrote, gets collected more slowly than code gets written; over the last weeks the project mostly moved because I kept nudging. An association's site is first of all its people, its texts and its photos; I can put the frame together in days, but there's no point rushing the living part.

The folks at the Verein are happy — that's the main thing. I'm happy too: a large, finished block of work is off my shoulders. The Ukrainian association now has its own place on the internet, on a Ukrainian-language domain, with an events calendar and a projects section, and they can run all of it themselves, without me.

What's left is waiting until they're sure everything behaves as expected — and pressing the indexing button.