This website dates back to 1997 as an online archive of cemeteries and burial records as a tool for genealogists. They hired us to transition it from a purely static HTML/CSS platform to an entirely database-driven, dynamic content site. The site had originally published some 50,000+ static pages containing content and burial records from thousands cemeteries across the world, using a not-so-accurate search engine powered by Google Programmable Search.

We started by duplicating their existing template designs into smaller, efficient CSS styles. Then we created a series of PHP-powered include-files to generate page sections like the header, menus, body, footer, and sidebars. From there we designed a database architecture that could store details about cemeteries, burial records, users, geographic areas, and then built relationships between them.

Finally, we created the programming logic that could dynamically pull all this information out of the database to build each URL on the fly.

On top of that, we built a highly-accurate search engine that could mine names of persons and names of cemeteries, and filter their results by dates of birth and death, and geographic areas. They also wanted sophisticated mapping that could plot cemeteries by region, and overlay polygons representing administrative boundaries. We also built them a custom affiliate-link system that could place text-based links by geographic area. The entire thing is hosted on its own Virtual Private Server for lightning fast speed.

On top of that, we had to keep their old set of webpages live, effectively hosting both the old site and new site together on the same domain, simply because the old site still had tens of thousands of in-bound links from other websites. After manually converting dozens of content pages into the database, we trained the client on how to do this task themselves.

This was probably our biggest, and most comprehensive job to date.