Congratulations to Sapphire Energy

Today, Sapphire Energy launched their public Web site. We are happy to have been part of this effort, which started at the beginning of the year and saw us join forces with Edelman, a global PR firm known for its great achievements and merits.

Sapphire Energy’s ground-breaking technology allows the production of gasoline from algae. This isn’t biodiesel either—it’s 91 octane gas that can be used in your car. In addition, Sapphire Energy does not need to use agricultural land as a source for its fuel. To learn more, check out Forbes’ write-up.

How Webficient Helped

We were primarily responsible for the implementation of the Web site you see today. One of the highlights involved creating a content management system for site administrators and marketing folks, so that items such as press releases and news clips could be easily managed. Supporting Edelman, we ensured the final product looked as good as the designer’s prototypes and the content was accurate.

Supporting Roles

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot more involved with a project of this caliber. To preemptively block domain squatters from buying up variations of SapphireEnergy.com, we helped research and secure dozens of other domain names.

We were responsible for all technology decisions, such as planning the infrastructure powering the Web site.

Also, a critical aspect of the project was preparing for launch day and the waves of visitors that would arrive in response to coverage in the major news outlets. We setup monitoring systems to detect any potential problems. Prior to the launch, we simulated various scenarios of site usage to test limits. This gave us a working model for understanding what to do as usage increased. [Editor’s note, 6/8/08: we’re happy to report that the site has been running since launch day without any downtime.]

Technology

We used the Ruby on Rails application framework to build what you see today. There are many reasons we love using Rails again and again in our projects, for clients and internal tools. We’ll elaborate on some of reasons in a more technical write-up in the near future.

Thanks

Webficient would like to thank its partners and vendors for contributing to the success of the overall project, launch day, and beyond.

• Sapphire Energy’s design is the brilliant production of Paula Wood. This was our first opportunity to work with Paula, and we hope to do so again in the future.

• Slicehost.com. Straightforward. Affordable. Awesome Web hosting. No problems to report since we started using their services earlier this year. We continue to recommend their services to clients and colleagues.

• Fiveruns, and their server and application monitoring service, is one of our recent favorites. Their service is easy to setup and provides valuable metrics that system administrators will eat up. We were able to use Fiveruns to provide real-time numbers to our client. It’s a great complement to Google Analytics.