PDG Internet Publishing House
Internet Portal Development and promotion company. Web portals creation and promotion, support located in Russia (ru), St.Petersburg. You can seek our consultancy service solution for Web 2.0 service or vertical (B2B & B2C ) portal and reach out to the world. Since its establishments, over a period of 7 years, PDG architected many portals for its valuable clients across various market segments: auto, real estate, jobs and interesting services.
OUR MISSION
To promote successful development of business by creation of quality portal decisions using of last Internets-technologies (Ajax, site visitor personalization, behavioral targeting).
OUR ADVANTAGES
There are highly skilled experts in internet marketing, portal design, portal programming work in our team, that provides qualitative and operative performance of works on each of stages.
Portal Design Group (PDG) has on its payroll experienced consultants with proper functional knowledge and technology people necessary to develop and deliver a quality Portal. PDG has focused in areas of:
- PHP 5.1, VB (6.0)
- JAVA, XML, AJAX
- MySQL 5 and Oracle
PDG has excellent designers and promoters to combine their powers of imagination to come up with a pleasant Portal. This is then blended with documented Quality and Management Methodology to ensure a presentable development.
Whatever your needs we can develop complex database-driven websites using PHP, AJAX and MySQL databases.
Some examples include:
- Real Estate software with which a real estate agent can add/edit properties and even email out to prospective buyers the lastest listings.
- Photography websites which allow you to maintain your photographs whether you be a professional or if you wish to put your wedding photos online for your guests and friends to visit.
- Membership areas for private access with different access levels for different customers or employees.
- Product catalogues - maintain a complete list of your products and services in an easy to search and navigate web application.
When a portal service has been designed and launched it is only natural to expect people to visit it. However website owners are starting to realise that more needs to be done to get people onto your site and then to convert those visitors into paying customers.
Search engines provide much of your website’s daily traffic. If you can tap into a rich stream of internet traffic then you can reach much of your target market. Many Search Engines e.g. Google look at a number of variables which then together determine your ranking or the position of your listing on their search results.
Press Releases can give you an opportunity to get valuable space online and in normal advertising media such as newspapers, magazines, TV and Radio. Providing newsworthy stories, to editors in your specialist field, can result in streams of traffic to your site. They also have the added benefit of providing up-to-date content for your site which can then also be indexed by the search engines e.g. Google.
Advertising should be everything you do. It starts from your Brand Identity which includes your logo(s) which appear in Internet and places that your future visitors go from stationery, business cards to your website and/or television advertising. When gathering content for a website portal why not produce branded literature such as brochures, flyers, business cards etc.
An effective Web portal offers the user a broad array of information, arranged in a way that is most convenient for the user to access. If designed correctly, a portal becomes a base of operations for Internet user, his or her home on the Web. To do this, the web portal administrator must provide the user fresh content, interactive elements, and easy access to the tools that the user needs. This called content support.
Ther is also marketing and technical support of project and Internt portals. In each situation ways to reach target people and stay them on your site are different.
An independent audit of your web portal can turn up a host of problems and opportunities — and many people are finding an outside audit is one of the best investments they can make in their online marketing and information systems.
An audit should give you answers to a number of critical questions:
o Does my site “work” on all or most browser versions and all computers?
o Is my site optimized for maximum search engine exposure?
o Does the site invite interaction with users and repeat visits that further the cause?
o Am I gathering and using useful information about visitors and my site?
o Am I breaking usability rules and thus frustrating or losing visitors?
o Is my site optimized for maximum download time?
o If the site is integrated with other media (such as direct mail) does that integration work for me or against me?
o Just as one would not ask an accounting department to audit its own work, it is imprudent to ask your web designer to conduct an audit. Luckily, there are a number of well-regarded consultants who offer audits or usability studies with Jakob Nielsen probably being the best known of these
Popular russian business newspaper for people, who come to St.Petersburg, has published an interview with Andrei Dobryi, CEO of Portal Design Group. Discussing theme - Web 2.0 innovation Internet projects in Russia and Saint Petersburg, it’s level, opportunities and features. Text according interview listed below.
St. Petersburg is preparing itself for the simultaneous release of several projects in a revolutionary new format — Web 2.0. Over the last two years the latter has become increasingly popular, both in Russia and abroad as it begins to attract the interest of key investors and funds.
The key difference between Web 2.0 and its predecessor, Web 1.0, comes down to the fact that content can now be generated by the user himself, whether it be for a blog-type service, social networks or a videoportal.
At ‘.ru’ websites there are altogether nearly twenty Web 2.0 resources, but it should be pointed out that many of them are imitations of their Western equivalents.
And although in St. Petersburg such projects are for the moment limited in number, players on the city’s web market are predicting the active development of this trend over the year ahead.
What is Web 2.0?
The appearance of the term Web 2.0 is related to an article by Tim O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?” published in September 2005. O’Reilly is considered one of the founders of the OpenSource movement and is head of his own publishing house, responsible for more than half of all classical computing literature currently available.
In the article O’Reilly explains the appearance of a large number of sites sharing several principles, as part of the general tendency for the development of Internet society, and called this Web 2.0, as opposed to older tendencies – Web 1.0.
Irrespective of continuing disagreements among experts as to what this term actually means, those who admit the existence of something called Web 2.0 identify several basic aspects of its form.
The familiar resource structure of the standard net Web 1.0 implies the availability of some kind of manager, who allocates the content of its resources for other users who receive this information unilaterally.
The main difference in Web 2.0 resource comes down to the fact that here the users themselves create their own content. The number of such users is defined by the informational value of the resource.
Orientation through this information is helped by key words through which the search service gets rid of unnecessary content.
In this way, the new Web transforms users of the Internet from a passive, anonymous mediator into an active public participant.
Standard Web 2.0 resources involve a blog service, social networks through which users interact on the basis of some characteristic that unifies them, and also RSS-ribbons and wiki (an online means to structure letters from multiple authors, a characteristic example being Wikipedia).
Web 2.0 includes resources allowing the allocation of media files to users (photos, video, music). Something else related to this is podcasting: the word coming from a combination of iPod and broadcasting and means broadcasting on portable audio players using RSS channels with links to audio recordings. Ultimately, podcasting is a blog made up of recorded mp3 files.
The classic way of using the standard Web 2.0 is the so-called mash-up, or the integration of various services. For example, by integrating a real estate web site with Google Maps one ends up with a new, more convenient service, which a user can use to see the exact location of each respective property on the market.
On top of semantic differences, Web 2.0 services should be distinguished by their simple and agreeable design and a minimum of graphics, which almost completely exclude flash and gif animations and other complex technologies.
Interactive applications are created using Ajax, RSS, SOA, CSS, XHTML, Atom and other technologies.
Web 3.0 on the Horizon
While use of the term Web 2.0 still provokes controversy among web specialists, Western programmers are already working on new technologies that will allow another web revolution.
Most specialists agree that the logical step from Internet documents linked together (Web 1.0) and linked information through the Internet (Web 2.0) will be the so-called ‘Semantic Web’ (Web 3.0) or World Wide Database.
Web 3.0 allows the creation of systems that give the clearest and most in-depth answers to difficult requests, saving users from analyzing a whole host of resources by themselves.
And for the moment, allowing for a number of skeptical enunciations, the popularity of Web 2.0 projects is an indisputable fact.
In 2006 the Western social networks My Space, You Tube and Facebook were successfully expanded.
The apotheosis of the popularity of these networks was the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion, suggesting that such projects are becoming more and more attractive to investors.
Web 2.0 became popular in Russia quite recently and is still underdeveloped: many projects are in the stage of beta testing, while their business models are equally insufficient. For the time being Russians use foreign Web 2.0 services like gmail.com, livejournal.com and others.
At the moment, the more popular Russian projects are being developed by programmers in the capital – resources such as blogus.ru (rating blogs on the basis of visitor numbers), moikrug.ru (a social network for professionals linked to information technology and the web), dirty.ru (one of the first collection of blogs, which appeared in November 2001), habrahabr.ru (news and blogs service for IT specialists), comby.ru (an analog to the foreign blog service MySpace), news2.ru (news portal, equivalent to the foreign digg.com), russianpodcasting.ru (podcasting project) and others.
All basic Russian search engines have also contributed to the active development of Web 2.0 services, for example, Yandex recently released its own RSS reader and finder among Runet blogs.
As far as St. Petersburg is concerned, the city lags around two to three years behind the capital in terms of the development of Web 2.0 services, and the amount of similar local resources are limited to single figures.
The first project on the horizon is probably the portal Free-lance.ru, which presents itself as a system of cooperation between employers and freelancers working at a distance.
The first pilot version of the portal was released in mid July 2004. However, as the project’s programmers have remarked, for the moment Free-lance.ru is only trying to comply to the Web 2.0 standard while gaining popularity among users.
25,000 users are currently registered, with more than 10,000 individuals visiting every day.
According to the head of the Free-lance.ru project, Anton Mazhiriin, deals made using the site worth a total of $3 million were concluded in 2005 – last year the number was at least three times bigger. The well known companies that searched for freelancers using this service include Mail.Ru, DP.ru, Defa, ‘Araba,’ Stockholm School of Economics and Mamba.
In the autumn of 2005 the creators of Free-lance.ru announced two new services – 10Mpx.ru and Syem Ruk (7ruk.ru), which were posited as Web 2.0 projects.
10Mpx.ru is intended to let photographers use the site to sell their work. The idea of Syem Ruk (seven hands) is based on a theory that everyone is known to one another across seven handshakes. In this way, Syem Ruk is a social network (a well-known federal equivalent is moikrug.ru or Moi Krug) and allows relations to be established between shared acquaintances.
Last month in St. Petersburg another portal was launched, claiming the title of the city’s first news portal in Web 2.0 format and called SP5.ru. The portal’s content takes form under the active participation of its users, who become united by the resource.
The creators underline the non-commercial character of the project and see it as unique, at least for the web market in St. Petersburg. The portal is currently available as a beta-version.
Those involved with St. Petersburg’s web market agree that in the local segment of ‘net.ru,’ the Web 2.0 services currently available are limited, linking it to the way St. Petersburg typically lags behind Moscow in the realm of IT technology.
Nevertheless, the directors of the city’s studios claim they have started work on projects related to Web 2.0 resources with several of them due for launch this spring.
According to Andrei Dobriy, general director of the Portal Design Group, “Most consider Web 2.0 to be a combination of a certain-styled design, clear usability and services, inducing people to create ‘unique content.’ Precisely the quality of this last aspect is what interests and is demanded by users.”
“In my opinion, there is currently no local Web 2.0 resource. It would be an exaggeration to label the latest initiatives coming from the Gorodovoi and SP5 portals, for example, as Web 2.0 resources,” he continued.
However, I am confident that the first Web 2.0 resource will appear in St. Petersburg sometime in the spring,” Dobriy said.
He also confirmed that the Portal Design Group is working on a new version of the popular city portal, cityspb.ru, which will be maintained in the ‘sleek’ style of Web 2.0.
“It will be a bigger service than a portal and more customization than information,” said Dobri.
Andrei Ryabikh, general director of the web studio Web Master.Spb, agreed that “apart from blogs, there are no fully-fledged Web 2.0 projects in St. Petersburg.”
However, he did say that there are more and more projects being done in the style of Web 2.0.
“In this sense, Moscow is normally two or three years ahead of us, although even this year will see the appearance of a few local Web 2.0 resources, one of which is from our own company,” he said.
“Typical Web 2.0 projects include 7ruk.ru, and Free-lance.ru, as well as online services allowing one to add one’s own information and use new technology such as Ajax, and, sometimes, to use several services together to create a more convenient product (the so-called mash up),” said Yuri Stepanov, general director of Peterlink Web.
“We are always ready to integrate the Web 2.0 ideology into projects that fulfill the needs of our customers if that is a necessary condition for success,” he said.
PDG successfully finished works over leading information portal of North-West Russia region AllNW.ru, comprehensive and systematic reporting on the socio-economic development in the region. Project provides monitoring everyday news 11 North-West Russian regions: The City of St Petersburg, Leningradskaya oblast, Kaliningrad, Murmansk and Novgorod provinces, the Republic of Karelia (Petrozavodsk), Vologda, Nenecky region and Republic Komi. It is also provides (all in russian) full information about regions of this area - Arhangelsk and Pskov.
The Russian Federation is divided in 89 territorial and administrative entities of power, or Subjects of the Federation. The Subjects, usually called ‘Regions’, formally have different statuses and names such as Autonomous Republic (Avtonomnaya respublika), Province (Oblast’), Territory (Krai), or Autonomous District (Avtonomnyy Okrug). The two main cities of Russia, the Federal Capital Moscow and St. Petersburg, have also a status as Subjects of the Federation.
In May 2000, the president Vladimir Putin introduced a new administrative level between the regions and the federal center by dividing Russia into seven Federal Districts (Federalnyy okrug). The North-West Federal District (NWFD) comprised 11 regions, all covering the project. The NWFD, which is the fourth largest of the Federal Districts, comprises ca. 10 % of the total territory of Russia, as well as approximately a tenth of the total population of the country. The administrative center of the federal district is St Petersburg.
These territories share a number of natural, geographical, climatic, historical and cultural particularities underlying the socio-economic development of their populations. The region lies in the northwest of Russia; in the north it is surrounded by the Barents, White and Karsk Seas, in the southwest, by the Baltic Sea. It borders on Norway, Finland, the Baltic countries and Poland.
The population of Russia’s Northwest is about 17 million (11% of the population of Russia), more than three times higher than the population of neighbouring Finland. About 70% of this population is urban. The total area of the region is 1.8 million sq. km or 10.5% of the territory of Russia, an area larger than the five Scandinavian countries, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Denmark - 1.6 million sq. km. Almost one-third of the population of Northwest Russia live in Saint Petersburg.
The climate is moderate continental, with warm humid summers and harsh winters with significant snow fall. The region includes several natural zones, from Arctic deserts to woods. The surface is mostly plain, with many rivers and lakes, the largest of which are Ladoga, Onega, Beloye and Ilmen. Many rivers are navigable and together form an integral water transport system providing direct commerce between Northern and Southern seas and other economic zones of Russia.
The basic natural riches are large deposits of coal, copper and nickel ores, apatite, bauxite, nepheline, manganese, oil, gas, oil shales and peat. North-West Russia contains 60% of the wood harvested in the European portion of the country.
The basic regional industries are: production of complex, precise machinery and instruments, metal processing, shipbuilding; metallurgy, pulp and paper industry, wood processing, chemistry, oil, gas and fuel extraction. In addition, consumer goods and electronics production is developed quite well. In the agricultural sector, cattle breeding, fur-farming, vegetable and flax growing prevail. The fishing industry is also well developed. As a result of the Soviet Union disintegration, further development of transport infrastructure, reconstruction of the St-Petersburg, Arkhangelsk, Murmansk and Kaliningrad ports and building of new ports on the Baltic Sea is essential to further economic grow.
One of the Russia’s most important scientific potentials is located in Northwest Russia, as a large network of middle and higher educational institutions as well as professional upgrade training centres are located here.
Today 20% of iron-ore, 18% of rolled black metal, 15% of steel, 17% of sulphuric acid, considerable amounts of oil and gas products is produced in the North-Western region, along with more than a quarter of the country’s timber and 56% of newsprint. The region provides around 20% of fish and other seafood and 30% of industrial products are exported to more than 50 countries.
The economy of Northwest Russia is for the most part, based on its raw materials wealth: almost 72% of Russia’s reserves of apatite and nearly 100% of their production, about 77% of titanium reserves, 45% of bauxite reserves, 19% of mineral waters reserves and about 18% of the reserves of diamonds and nickel are concentrated in its territory. Oil and coal production also an increasingly important part of the Russian economy.
Northwest Russia houses well-established cultural centres, world-famous architectural, historical and cultural monuments. With its unique nature and climate, the region offers all possibilities for development of various kinds of tourism. Recent reforms are crucial for the economy of the region, which, in the Soviet period, had a state order orientation, military complex being the top priority. The experience of the past decade in the sphere of industrial reformation and private business development provides a basis for cooperation, investments in production and realization of projects.
Strong ties and contacts between Northwest Russia and other regions of the Russian Federation, as well as CIS and foreign countries, in the sphere of trade and industry provide a strong basis for successful market reforms.
The size of the potential market, the abundance and variety of natural resources, the highly qualified workforce, the well-developed scientific and technical base, together with benefits of the geographical position on the crossroads of world trading routes all work for the benefit of investment activity, contributing to a favourable investment climate.
The oil and gas resources of the Nenets area and the Barents Sea shelf are the most attractive for investment. Only their largest projects are estimated about US $25 bn in aggregate. According to expert forecasts, this district can become the country’s second largest fuel producer. If the industrial production of the oil and gas reserves of the shelf begins, this will give a strong impetus to the development of coastal regions - local people will bee employed and defence industry enterprises, of which there are a great many in the territory, will receive orders connected with conversion.
According to regional authorities, as of today the top priorities for investment are the following: creation of high-technology productions, military complex conversion, development of new natural resources deposits, development of transport network, environmental protection, development of tourism and recreation infrastructure.
The activities of the regional administrative and legislative authorities, aimed at improving the investment climate, has resulted in Northwest Russia taking its place among Russian most attractive regions from the point of view of a potential investor.
St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast rank among the Russian leaders in terms of the level of FDI and the Republic of Komi and Arkhangelsk Oblast - among the top 20 by this figure of the subjects of the Russian Federation. By the level of foreign direct investment, the North-West occupies second place, and is only behind the Central federal district.
Among foreign investors of Northwest Russia are major multinational companies, such as: General Electric, ABB, Siemens, JT-International, Philip Morris, Wrigley, Nestle, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, Conaco, Caterpillar, Procter and Gamble, ICN Pharmaceuticals, De Biers, etc. A traditional partner and a large investor of the Northwest is Finland. 80% of external investments from this country falls in Northwest Russia.
The business environment may be somewhat complex, but economic trends are positive for export sales from the West, with some 9,000 foreign joint ventures accounting for 40% of St. Petersburg’s economic output.
Naturally, investments in the extractive industry and the primary processing of its products will remain significant. Such successfully operating companies as Vologodskaya Severstal, Novgorodsky Acron, KomiTEK, Kolsky State Integrated Iron-and-Steel Works (Murmansk Oblast), Kotlasky Integrated Pulp-and-Paper Mill (Arkhangelsk Oblast) may be of great interest to investors.
The task related to the development and modernization of transport systems is of particular priority for Northwest Russia. There is only one large transit hub in the region now - St. Petersburg, where there are highways, railroads, water ways and a sea port. Now, this “conveyer” is malfunctioning more and more often, especially when handling cargoes at the port. The solution of the problem may be the formation of a network of specialized sea terminals, widening of “bottlenecks” at the other elements of the transport system.
Leningrad Province
| Territory | 85 300 square kilometers |
| Population | 1.671 million inhabitants |
| Density of population | 19.6 (persons /1 sq. km) |
| Urban population | 66.6 % |
| Gross Regional Product in 2003 | 117.8 RUR billion |
| Unemployment in 2003 | 9.2 % |
| Main cities (1000 inhabitants) | Gatchina (82,4) Vyborg (80,6), Tikhvin (68,1), Sosnovyi Bor (62,1) |
| Natural resources | forest, bauxite, clay, phosphorite, slate, granite, limestone, gravel |
| Main industries | fuel industry, food industry, wood working, pulp and paper industry |
The history of the province reflects the many administrative changes that the Northern and North-Western zones have undergone during the last century. The Leningrad province became an independent administrative unit in 1927 with a vast territory encompassing, among others, the current Leningrad, Murmansk, Novgorod and Pskov provinces. In 1931, the city of Leningrad was given an independent administrative status under the federal legislation.
In 1938, the Murmansk region and in 1944 the cities of Novgorod and Pskov also became independent provinces. The Leningrad province remained a region surrounding the city of Leningrad (presently St Petersburg) without a capitol of its own.
With its population of 1.7 million people, the province constitutes a significant administrative unit. It occupies a large territory stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the lakes Ladoga and Onega.
Contact information:
E-mail: web20@pdg.ru
Address:
“PDG Internet Publishing House”. office 201, 120-I Obukhovskoy Oborony St. Petersburg, Russia 192012 Tel./fax: +7 812 622 1762