The Official website of the Baha'is of the United States Project (THIS SITE HAS SINCE BEEN REDESIGNED AND IS NO LONGER MY WORK ON THE LIVE SITE) involved many powerful aspects of web development. I personally designed, developed, and implemented this project from start to finish.
Features utilizing open source software (OSS), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web metrics with Google Analytics, streaming Flash video through Akamai's global network, and podcasting have brought this web presence fully up to date set the stage for continued expansion.
With ever increasing costs of software licenses and user fees we set out to make a statement with this project and show that through the use of open source software projects such as Drupal.org we could build a powerful web presence the would rank at the top of the search engines and deliver a wealth of features without all the added expense of commercial software packages like Vignette, Ektron, Sharepoint, and the likes. This also enabled the client to share all the technology that we developed with other institutions in this global religion. This solution used the LAMP stack of Linux - Apache - mySQL - PHP which are all open source projects in thier own rights.
It was a goal from the beginning of this project to have the site rank as #2 in the search engines on the terms bahai - bahai faith - baha'i - baha'i faith - bahai temple. In the course of 6 months the site has risen to this #2 two postition just below the Baha'i World site which should rank as #1. This came about through careful planning and implementing SEO strategies as taught by one the leading SEO practitioners in the business.
At the launch of this project Google serendipitously launched Google Analytics as a free service to existing beta customers. We were able to incorporate this powerful metrics tool from day one of the site launch and how found the results to be astounding with global traffic averaging 800 unique visitors a day from 150 countries per week.
We setup a flash streaming video account with Akamai who is the industry leader in streaming video. This enabled us to begin integrating elements of Flash content with streaming video embededd. We were also able to obtain definitive statistics for analysis of traffic patterns and video usage.
To date the site have been featured in Enlightenment Magazine, Seattle Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers as well as winning an award for Excellence from the Religious Communicators Counsel.
