Authors & Academia · WordPress · 2021
Janet Afary
Dr. Janet Afary, Professor of Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara, has many publications and ongoing research projects. Olibro designed and developed her first website back in 2009, but she wanted to upgrade the design.
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The challenge
Organizing a massive amount of content in a way that they were easily accessible was the primary challenge to the website. Dr. Afary needed the content to be cross-referenced and shown in a variety of settings.
The solution
We combined both, aesthetics and functionlity, into the information architecture right from the start. Many days were spent on how to organize Dr. Afary’s academic work – books, articles, and projects – into a unified whole.
Dr. Janet Afary is a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara — a scholar of modern Iranian culture, gender, and politics in Muslim-majority societies. She is also Olibro’s very first paying client. The relationship started in 2009 and has run unbroken for more than 17 years.
The problem
An academic with a prolific publishing record needs a website that quietly does several jobs at once: a credible front door for press and peers, a working catalog of books, articles, lectures, and conference appearances, and a place that can absorb new material as it arrives. The site had to keep up with three platform generations, a security incident, and the steady output of a working scholar — without ever going dark.
What we delivered
- An academic portfolio architecture. A WordPress information architecture mapped to how academic work actually behaves — Books, Articles, Lectures, Conferences, Themes, News — with single-book templates that handle covers, publishers, and tabbed content, and archives that scale as the catalog grows.
- A full Divi rebuild in 2020–2021. The third generation of the site, built page by page from a fresh design brief: homepage with book carousel, About, Academic Themes, single-book and single-post templates for News, Articles, Conferences, and Media, branded 404, and a media archive. Staged on afary.olibro.pro, then cut over to production with full QA and analytics setup.
- A second site for the institution. In 2010–2012 we built and launched the UCSB Iranian Studies Program site (ucsb.IranianStudiesProgram.com) — subdomain, WordPress install, faculty and student page templates, a faculty directory, courses and sponsors archives, and a seminar page — then handed editorial access to program staff.
- 17 years of continuous care. Hack-attack recovery and security hardening in 2013. Server migrations in 2014 and 2024. A 4-year monthly maintenance retainer covering WP core, theme, and plugin updates, Wordfence scans, and S3 backup verification. Steady content publishing through every new book, lecture video, and article. WebCare from late 2024 onward.
Why it matters
This is the engagement that started Olibro. Dr. Afary was the first client to pay us for design and development work, and the partnership has outlasted three site generations, two server migrations, a hack, and every platform shift WordPress has been through since 2009. A 17-year client relationship is its own kind of case study — the kind you can’t fake or shortcut.
WordPress / Divi · design, development, security recovery, server migrations, ongoing content and care.
Before → after
How the site changed.
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