His Holiness The Dalai Lama Case Study

HIS HOLINESS The Dalai Lama

URL: www.dalailama.com

Launch date: December 2005
Market: Official website for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Audience: approx. 100,000 unique users per month

 

Whatever we write about this project it will never convey our personal passion and pride being able to work on such an inspiring website development. Inspite of this we will endeavour to outline the project from conception to delivery...

 

Communications with The Office of His Holiness started back in 2003, since then we have diligently worked with the in-house team to design and create a primarily visual site that informs the site visitors about The Dalai Lama and his teachings around the World.

Starting any website from scratch is always a challenge but in this case we also had to manage the international time difference (5.25 hours) and work alongside the Indian team throughout the design approval process. This took quite a while, as we had to satisfy the Approval committee at each stage, remaining flexible and fluid at all times.

 

It was decided early on that we would power the new website with Chameleon's Mosaic CMS, providing administrative access in order that they take control of the site on a day-to-day basis.

 

The resulting system is technically a hybrid development and utilises both tables and CSS techniques for the front-end construction. This decision was made to accommodate early browsers (such as IE3) which has limited CSS support.

 

Once we had created the English language version of the site we were tasked with developing the Chinese version. This involved some fine tuning on our CMS to recognise and deliver Chinese based characters. The result can be found here at chinese.dalailama.com

 

Currently, the Dalai Lama website is building its visiting levels as the benefit of the new website takes effect. The in-house team are forging ahead with a wide range of live and archived webcasts which are proving very popular. The Team are continuing to use the Mosaic system on a daily basis, updating news stories and promoting teachings and events.

In the future we hope to work on other developments for The Office of His Holiness, and wish say a big thankyou for their generosity and kindness throughout this unique development.