About the project
The people behind Explore Uzbekistan
Three founders who wanted their country explained properly — accurately, beautifully, and in the six languages the world reads. This is who they are, and how the site was built.
- 41
- days from the first brief to launch
- 6
- languages, every page complete
- 48
- people in Faces of Uzbekistan
- 42
- full life stories
- 14
- regions on the interactive map
The founders
Three people, one idea
Each of them took on a different part of the work.
Founder & Researcher
Zafarbek Khomidjonov
LinkedInCo-founded Explore Uzbekistan with the conviction that a country is best explained by the people who live in it. Works on the research behind the sections and on making sure what the site says about Uzbekistan is accurate before it is interesting.
What they worked on
- Gathered and fact-checked most of the website's content
- Briefed the web developer on what to build
- Reached out to potential sponsors for collaboration
- Curated the Faces of Uzbekistan profiles and facts
- Developed new ideas for the project
Media Researcher
Jahongir Maxmudov
LinkedInOne of the three who started Explore Uzbekistan. The project rests on a shared idea — that a country is worth explaining properly, in the languages the people asking actually read — and it exists because none of them wanted to keep sending friends abroad links that did not say anything.
What they worked on
- Collected photos and videos to support the content
- Helped make the website clearer and easier to follow
- Resized or edited media so pages load quickly
- Helped the project run in six languages
Web Developer
Muhammadamin Baxodirov
LinkedInStarted Explore Uzbekistan out of a simple frustration: almost everything written about the country in English was either a tour brochure or a footnote in someone else's history. This site is the version he wanted to be able to send people.
What they worked on
- Designed and built the website
- Made the site work on phones and tablets
- Trained BEK on the site's content
- Set up the domain and hosting
- Enabled the Uzbek-English translation feature
- Lead developer of the site
How it was built
From a brief to a live site in 41 days
A detailed plan, round after round of review, and the patience to get every page right.
The brief
The founders wrote down exactly what the site had to be: six complete languages including right-to-left Arabic, an AI guide called BEK, every region on a real map, traditional naqsh ornament — and a standard high enough that a design studio would put it in its portfolio.
A first version online
The next day a first working version was live, so the idea could be tried on real phones and shown to real people instead of described.
An identity of its own
A new logo; BEK drawn as a mascot; a map rebuilt from real borders so all fourteen regions are exact; and naqsh patterns redrawn from the ornament of real monuments. The founders sent the references — and sent back every version that looked too simple.
Photographs and film
They gathered the photographs and footage — the hero video, the gallery, the pictures for every section — and named each file for the place where it belonged.
Review, page by page
They went through the site line by line and returned lists of changes — twenty points in one round, eleven in the next — from checking facts about modern life to a white stripe missing from the flag a boy holds on the home page.
Faces of Uzbekistan
Portraits of thirty-nine scholars and Jadid reformers collected and sorted; forty full life stories researched and published in six languages; and every link that sent readers away from the site removed.
exploreuzbekistan.uz
The domain was bought, connected and secured, and the site went live — with a security review behind it and an editor locked to the founders' own accounts, so the work can keep growing.
What we hold to
Four rules we kept
Accurate before interesting
Dates are checked and sources compared, and anything that could not be confirmed is left out — even when it would have made a better story.
Every language is complete
No version is a summary of another. The site will not publish if a single sentence is missing in any of the six languages.
The whole story, here
Full biographies live on the site itself, so a reader never has to leave to find out more.
Fast for everyone
Built to open quickly on an ordinary phone on a slow connection, and to stay calm for people who prefer less motion.
See what we built
Start anywhere — or ask BEK, who knows every page of the site.
Write to us: [email protected]