GeoCurrents.info

Click image for enlarged view.

URL: www.GeoCurrents.info
Time to prototype: 5 hrs 40 min
Start to finish: 30 hrs 30 min

Went Live In: March 2011

Page Rank: PR stands for Page Rank, and is the public view of Google’s ranking of a site on a 10 point exponential scale, according to the number and quality of incoming links that site has pointed to it.

Alexa Rank: Alexa is a web information company and subsidiary to Amazon. The Alexa Rank represents the company’s ranking of a site’s traffic when compared to all the other websites on the Internet.

GeoCurrents.info has been one of my favorite website development projects to work on. The site is the geography blog of Stanford University Senior Lecturer Martin W. Lewis, a man whose extensive knowledge of the world is near-baffling to witness first hand. On GeoCurrents, Professor Lewis taps this knowledge to provide map-illustrated commentary on current events through a geographical lens. As I write this in November 2011, the site reaches over 11,000 visitors each month.

To understand how the site has reached this point, I’ll provide a little bit of the background and thought process behind the current set up.

I had the pleasure of attending Prof. Lewis’ lectures for two quarters of his course Global Human Geography during my junior undergraduate year at Stanford. Prof. Lewis integrated GeoCurrents with the class during this year, using his articles as starting points for class discussion. The design of the site at this time though, done through Blogger, did not allow for any categorization or archiving of old posts, of which there were hundreds, and the permalink (url) structure of the site made it impossible for search engines to recognize individual pages.

Before

After

The result of all these considerations was what I consider a dream project: fascinating, high-quality content that when re-structured and optimized could reach a vastly larger audience.

I told Prof. Lewis of the vision I had for that potential, and he began to tell me of his own concerns for the site. Soon after we had reached an agreement on the direction we wanted to take the site though, I left the country to study abroad in Italy. Thus, all of the work was managed remotely. Fortunately, the collaborative redesign of a website can work just about as well from 8,000 miles away as it does from next door.

It took less than 6 hours to produce a prototype of the site, and most of the rest of the 30.5 hours we list as having spent working on this site had to do with going through each of the 300-plus posts that had already been written.

Once the main framework of the site had been created and optimized, I also utilized some third-party plugins to put together an interactive map page, called the GeoCurrents Master Map, that lets users browse each of the site’s posts geographically.