Case study · Memorial · Civic campaign

In Memory of Anna Politkovskaya

A memorial site for a journalist who gave her life reporting on human rights — built to tell her story in a living, unsentimental voice, and to support a civic campaign asking her former neighbors to back a memorial plaque. Built entirely from scratch, no templates, deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

Solo, full-cycle Bilingual (RU/EN) Civic campaign page Cloudflare Pages

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Goal

Tell her story like a person, not a headline — and turn that into local support for a physical memorial.

Tell Anna Politkovskaya's story in a living, unsentimental voice — as a rescuer and negotiator during Nord-Ost and Beslan, and as a defender of ordinary people, not only as a murdered journalist
Persuade her former neighbors to support installing a memorial plaque on the building where she lived
Bring her published archive, biography, and humanitarian work together in one place

Before / After

What existed before this site didn't exist as one place.

Before

Information about her scattered across press mentions and archived articles in different outlets
Separate, disconnected material about the murder investigation
No single place telling her story in a living, unsentimental voice
No organized channel for neighbors to support a memorial plaque

After

A multi-page site on its own domain — biography, publications archive, humanitarian work, and the memorial page in one place
A dedicated civic-initiative page with a form for neighbors to register their support
Bilingual RU/EN, built and deployed as a fast static site
Findable in search, with structured data explaining who she was directly to search engines

What was done

Six areas of work, from primary-source research to deployment.

Structure & pages

Designed and wrote a multi-page architecture from scratch: homepage, biography, publications archive, the memorial/civic-initiative page, plus dedicated subpages on the murder investigation and her humanitarian work
Every page built in two full language versions (Russian and English), correctly cross-linked

Text & content research

Every text block on the site written from scratch — introductions, biographical sections, event accounts (Nord-Ost, Beslan), international-recognition material
Researched from primary sources: her book "Тем, что было" ("For What"), transcripts of documentary interviews and colleagues' accounts, and official government responses
Selected and proofread pieces from her published archive of 60+ articles for tone and fit — published verbatim, with no editing of her own words

Design & layout

Built a coherent visual system: a light, paper-toned palette deliberately free of mourning-black cliché, custom display + text typography, one signature accent color
Fully responsive layout for mobile and desktop
A custom monogram favicon

Animation & interactivity

Smooth fade-in for content blocks as the reader scrolls to them — biography and timeline sections in particular
Subtle CSS "float" animation on decorative elements
A hand-built photo carousel with manual controls (arrows, indicator dots), plain JavaScript, no libraries
Year-by-year tab switching in the publications archive, with no page reload

Backend & functionality

A contact form on the memorial page, for neighbors and visitors to register support — routed through a third-party form service, no server of its own required
Visitor analytics configured (Google Analytics)
Deployed as a static project on Cloudflare Pages — no framework overhead, maximum load speed

SEO & technical optimization

Meta tags, canonical links, Open Graph markup, and Schema.org (Person) structured data for correct display in search and social shares
robots.txt and sitemap.xml with hreflang tags for both language versions, for correct bilingual indexing
Optimized images and versioned stylesheets for cache control

Results

What it did, measured — real Search Console data, July 22 – August 15.

0 total search impressions, first 3.5 weeks

0 clicks from search, starting from zero

0 peak daily impressions, August 6

79% of impressions came from mobile. Top search terms are her name itself — "анна политковская" and "политковская" — meaning people already looking for her now reliably find this site.