We’ve just relaunched a website for Sam Harris, who is probably best known as the author of the New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. If you went to his website in July 2006, you’d know that (and only that), because that was the core focus of the site’s previous existence.
Harris came to Hop Studios because he was getting ready to publish a new book, Letter to a Christian Nation, and he needed to redesign. He wanted a website that would meet two goals: to promote his current book, and to be neutral and flexible enough to support any future books or projects he might do.
The design we came up with accomplishes this, if we do say so ourselves. It serves as a graceful, pleasant backdrop to whatever he might come up with, and is crafted to be expandable in many ways.
Harris also wanted to be able to edit any part of his website without having to hunt through the administrative interface; we made sure that all the text of his site has one-click editing links visible only to administrators. (Of course, you won’t be able to see that particular feature.)
Finally, we did a general cleanup; updated software, unified the site’s styles, consolidated navigation and added SIFR, which is a Flash-and-JavaScript technique that lets you use any font you want on the site without sacrificing usability or quick loading.
The week we were set to launch, we also undertook an extra task: the quick and important migration from one mailing list solution to another. This wasn’t part of the initial project scope, but sometimes a client needs us to react quickly to solve a business problem, and we did.
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