Review App

Case Study: fresh BIBLE

Have you ever heard an idea and thought, why didn't anyone think of this before? We feel that way about fresh BIBLE, an innovative web site that is changing the way folks search and interact with the Bible.
fresh BIBLE allows registered members to create lists of their favorite passages, add comments, and even tag verses for later retrieval. And like other online Bibles, fresh BIBLE offers a powerful search function that makes it simple to find scripture based on keywords or reference. fresh BIBLE is perhaps one of the biggest technological innovations to target the holy Bible since the days of Guttenberg and his printing press.

What they wanted

  • Initial content acquisition and information architecture
  • A way for users to search for scripture based on keywords and reference (book chapter:verse)
  • Reviews, tags, and lists tied to Biblical verses
  • An intuitive interface for interacting with scripture passages
  • Search engine visibility down to the verse level

How we helped

The King James version of the holy Bible contains 31,097 verses spread over 68 books which makes for a pretty large data set by most standards. The first step in establishing fresh BIBLE was to find this data and load it into a Review App data table. The King James version of the Bible is one of the few translations available without copyright restrictions and we helped fresh BIBLE find the data files necessary for a clean load. After transforming the data into Microsoft Excel format we were able to quickly load the whole Bible into Review App in a single file, all 30K+ records!

fresh BIBLE also needed a search function that allowed users to search by either keyword or reference and we built a custom function to accomplish this. We also customized the review, tag, and list functions to match unique circumstances - like the need for reviews to potentially span single or multiple listing records. All the custom functions were built in less than a week and fit inside the slick Review App admin interface.

Speaking of interfaces, fresh BIBLE makes use of some slick AJAX and Javascript functions to make reading the Bible online easier for everyone from teens to grandmas. Click a verse to highlight a passage; pull in surrounding verses to read a passage in context; favorite a verse without leaving the passage itself. Play around with fresh BIBLE and you'll agree the interface rocks!

Finally, a big part of the fresh BIBLE project was to add a new layer of visibility to the Bible for searches - both on the site and off. For example, when users tag a passage with a word, that word becomes associated with the passage for future searches. If a user tags John 3:16 with the word 'hope,' future searchers for 'hope' will not only find verses where the word hope is specifically used but they'll also find John 3:16 whose theme is hope. Tags, reviews, and lists open up infinite possibilities for content growth for a book that was written 2,000 years ago.

The fresh BIBLE project was one of our favorites and we always get jazzed when we get involved in innovative web ideas. How can we make your crazy web site idea a reality?