Liberty Fund

Liberty Fund is one of my oldest clients, and I had built three generations of their Online Library of Liberty site before they asked me to re-imagine their public Web site. In addition to designing the site, they also needed me to build an internationalized book store, and a content aggregation system that would gather new articles published across their network of Web properties.

The store was custom-built to support Liberty Fund’s international sales system. Separate fulfillment centers in Canada, England, and the US handle sales from each of their territories. In the US and related territories, sales are completed through Stripe. In addition to the Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund publishes a number of current-event blogs, all of which are syndicated into the main Liberty Fund site through a custom-built RSS reader.

Liberty Fund
The home page showcases featured books, loaded at random
Liberty Fund
RSS-powered content aggregation system gathers headlines from other Liberty Fund Web sites
Liberty Fund
Feature pages explain Liberty Fund’s many educational resources
Liberty Fund
The history of Liberty Fund
Liberty Fund
Liberty Fund books are showcased for sale, with content preview and international pricing
Liberty Fund
Checkout, including coupon validation and fulfillment, is completely custom-built

This site is built with Ruby on Rails, and features the powerful open-source Sphinx search engine. The book catalog interfaces with Liberty Fund’s Publishing division through a custom JSON API. Using a custom console site, administrators are able to select featured books and news stories, update and add pages to the site, and maintain coupon codes, shipping prices, and other store details.