A beautiful new web site has been launched during the Festival of Ridvan by the Baha’i International Community. In addition, a newly revamped news web site has been launched at news.bahai.org. Here is a direct quote from the press release:
HAIFA, Israel — The Bahá’í World News Service has launched a new Web site that includes an expanded home page and a section designed to meet the needs of journalists. The address remains the same – www.news.bahai.org.
The section for media representatives includes brief descriptions of the Bahá’í Faith and its beliefs and history; a list of Houses of Worship; a style guide with spellings and definitions of names and terms; photos for downloading; and contact information.
All the pages for BWNS news, features, photos, slide shows, and video have been redesigned.
The makeover is the first stage in a plan to redo all the sections on www.bahai.org, the international Web site of the Bahá’í Faith. The new home page for that site also appears today.
Also, nine countries have been added to a page that provides links to Web sites and contact information for many of the national Bahá’í communities around the world. The goal is to have a link for every country.
All the Web sites are maintained by the Bahá’í International Community’s Office of Public Information at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa.
Job well done to the Office of Public Information Internet team!
The Baha’i World Center has launched a new website dedicated to the life of Baha’u'llah, the Prophet-Founder of the Baha’i Faith. I am grateful for having had the honor of playing a tiny role in this project — mainly by assisting the very capable web team of the Baha’i International Community with the website’s search engine optimization — and humbled by the beautiful work the whole team has put together.
What is unique about this site is that it presents in a very artistic yet search engine friendly way a rich photographic journey through the life of the most current messenger of God, and offers to the viewers a wealth of images of artifacts and writings of Baha’u'llah.
Great job to Brian Kurzius and the whole team, and my deep gratitude for having been allowed to play a small part in this exciting project.
I am finally getting around to post on my blog after a busy period of time. I had mentioned earlier that my team is in the process of intranet overhaul. I was in contact with Jane McConnell about her worldwide intranet study. She is in the process of preparing the 2007 questionnaire now and it will posted be on line for three months from the beginning of June to the end of August in order to be available for people in different countries before and after holidays. The results will be published the first week of October, exactly one year after the 2006 results were released.
In 2006 Jane had 101 organisations participate from around the world; she is hoping to reach at least 150 if not 200 in 2007. In the meantime, if you have not downloaded the 2006 Summary report, you can do so at this link.
If you have any comments or suggestions for additional topics you would like to see covered, let Jane know.
The Financial Times today posted in their Digital Business section an article summarizing the findings of a new comparative study of how the websites of the 60 biggest corporations — 20 from North America, 20 from Europe, and 20 from the rest of the world — rank in terms of serving its main constituents and overall accomplishing what a website is supposed to accomplish. The surprise is in the composition of the winning list, the FT Bowen Craggs Index:
“Of the top ten companies in the rankings, eight are European based; just two come from the US.”
As a European living in the U.S., I welcome such studies which should encourage us all to learn from each other, regardless of where we come from. The Silicon Valley is not the whole world, and that is a good thing.
As my team is preparing to launch out company’s intranet overhaul, I am reading through some interesting and informative articles and blogs:
I am pleased to announce that the One World Baha’i School website has been redesigned and launched on the WordPress platform. I am very greatful for the highly flexible WordPress theme from Semiologic and the help from numerous fellow web developers. The new site should enable to school managing staff to post and edit content independently in a user-friendly and search-engine friendly manner.
For those in the Northern Virginia area, seeking spiritual education for children and adults alike, I could not recommend a better place than the One World Baha’i School!
Google is famous for its doodles and holiday logos. Today’s is not an exception: Valentine’s Day is as good an excuse as any to be creative. I just thought it was funny that they overlooked the spelling and missed the L, resulting in Googe. Is it coincidental, or is it that the L is out for lunch or the artist is in love 
P.S. Oh, well, I should have known better. Had I read the official Google blog today, I would have known that this all was intentional. Moreover, as someone at reddit noted:
The logo is intentional, and is a reference to Barnabe Googe, a 16th century poet famous for the following line: “I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.”
Anyway, Happy Valentine’s Day!
I just decided to check whether Walmart has done anything about browser-compatibility (or lack thereof as noted yesterday) of its new video download store. Yes, they have… less than I expected but still better than nothing. They have posted an announcement that Firefox is not supported:
Now, why is it difficult to me to imagine that the local Walmart store screens out incoming customers and declines access to to the 10% of them? That is exactly what happens when you do not allow the 10% or so of web visitors using Firefox. All it takes is to design using web standards…
Yesterday Walmart launched a video download store which is supposed to rival iTunes in enabling online download of movies. The selection of more than 3000 titles is impressive. What is disappointing is that the site does not work in Firefox:
Not surprisingly, the store works fine in Internet Explorer 7:
Now, having the word BETA on a newly launched website is a fine, and nowadays fashionable, excuse — a certainly more elegant solution than the notorious “site under contruction” sign we used to see in the yesteryears — but neglecting 10% or so of your web audience which uses the Firefox browser, does not make much business sense, particularly when you want to establish credibility in a new business.
Just a brief list of free tools for Ajax web development:
And a couple of cool online calendars:
Last but not least, a summary of a presentation by Adam Bosworth, Google’s VP of Engineering, on the past failure and current success of Ajax:
“…in the end, AJAX got a second life, primarily because the physics changed” - Adam Bosworth
