From the earliest pages of 2002 to today’s daebrest.by
The earliest archived copy found of the “Disabled Person and Environment” website is dated 17 October 2002. The website itself may have appeared earlier.
Over the years, the website changed repeatedly along with the organisation, its projects and its objectives. Its design, structure, technologies and publishing methods evolved, but its main purpose remained the same: to tell people about the organisation, its projects, events and community.
The surviving versions now let us see what the website looked like in different years and how far it has come in more than two decades.
2002–2003. The first versions of the website
The earliest archived copy found of the “Disabled Person and Environment” website is dated 17 October 2002.
By modern standards, the earliest versions looked very simple. Their pages contained essential information about the organisation, its work and its projects.
Even then, the website had separate sections on the organisation’s history, current work, photographs and contact information. The early versions also offered navigation in Russian and English.
This was the first stage in creating the organisation’s own information space on the Internet.
2004. Developing the structure
By 2004, the website had changed noticeably.
Navigation had become more developed, with separate sections for projects, history, the forum, partners and contacts. The home page published the organisation’s news and information about events.
The website was gradually evolving from a small information page into a fully fledged online resource for the organisation.
2011–2012. More materials and projects
The website continued to develop in the following years.
It published materials about the organisation’s programmes, international projects, seminars, public activities, photography club, environmental programmes and other areas of work.
The website’s structure grew considerably, and it served not only as the organisation’s online presence but also as an archive of its activities.
2015–2016. A new design
The appearance of the website changed again in 2015–2016.
It received a more modern design for its time, while navigation and the presentation of publications also changed.
The website continued to publish the organisation’s news and materials about international projects, festivals and other events.
2020–2022. A new stage of development
By 2020, the website had received another major update.
Its design, home-page structure and ways of presenting projects and news changed.
On 15 March 2022, the organisation adopted its current name: BOOOPI “Disabled Person and Environment”.
The 2022 version already shows a substantial accumulated information base: news, projects, materials about the Inclusive School for Independent Living, healthy-lifestyle programmes, KeramArt, “Neprataptany shliakh” and other areas of work.
2026. Today’s daebrest.by
Development of a new version of the website began in 2026.
By then, many years of experience with the website had provided a clear understanding of what information visitors really needed, how navigation should be organised, which sections the organisation required and how convenient the administration area needed to be.
Modern AI assistants, including ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, began to be used while creating the new version.
AI greatly accelerated development and helped implement many technical tasks, but the modern website did not emerge solely because of these new tools.
A website can be built very quickly from a technical standpoint. Making it genuinely convenient, understandable and suitable for many years of work is an entirely different task.
That requires an understanding of what the website must do, what structure it needs, how visitors will find information, how its administration area should work and how the website will continue to evolve.
It was the experience accumulated from working with the website between 2002 and 2026 that made it possible to formulate these requirements and, together with modern technologies, create the current version of daebrest.by.
More than 20 years of history
Technologies, design and the website’s structure changed over this time, but it continued to serve its main purpose: preserving and telling the story of the organisation’s work.
Many older versions survive in the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine, allowing us to see how daebrest.by looked in different years.
