Sam Harris

Overview

Live Site

www.samharris.org

Client Since

June 2006

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers The End of Faith and Waking Up. He writes about atheism, reason, politics, and religion.

Services Provided

Back in 2006, Sam Harris had a simple website that was focused on a single book he’d written. 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.

We redesigned his website to make it more of a showcase for all his activities: events, books, blogging, articles, and more. 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 built a spiffy recommended books section.

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.

Since then, we’ve undertaken many other large projects for Harris. We migrated his forums from PHPBB to ExpressionEngine. We set up a PayPal donation system, both one-time and subscription-based, to raise funds for a foundation he’s organizing, and then migrated the engine to Braintree and added Apple Pay for convenience. We set up ticket sales for a year-long lecture series. We helped create a book recommendation area that drew significant Amazon Affiliate revenue. And we’ve migrated him from one hosting company to another to handle the huge web traffic spikes he gets.

We also helped him design and launch The Waking Up podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of iTunes Best of 2015. He won a 2017 Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.