I created the Bahá'í Prayers website because I wanted to see the prayers presented on the web in a manner that emphasized the beauty of these scriptures.  I selected nature photos of plants, rocks, trees, landscapes, all without visible animal or human populations, to accompany the prayers.  This seemed to encourage a sense of peace on the site. 

On this page, when you click one of the images below you'll be taken directly to that page on the website.

This is the home page of the site, with prayers located one level down in subject categories (Healing, Children).  The prayers are also available by author and by directly searching for a passage.  Throughout the site, every page has at least a short verse from the Bahá'í scriptures at the top, if not an entire prayer as body content.  Navigation lives on the left, and expands once you get into the content pages to show links to individual prayers in a category.

Here is a healing prayer from the English site.  All the prayers on the English site are presented in a similar way, with a title or short passage at the top of the content area, followed immediately by a drop-cap letter to draw your eye and then the prayer itself.  This was the first site I worked on where I moved the content up close to the top of the page without any top banner; it turned out to be an effective design and I later used it on commercial projects. 

Here is the home page for Kekahi Mau Pule Baha'i (Bahá'í Prayers in the Hawaiian Language).  A friend from the islands sent a me a small prayer book created by the Bahá'í community in Hilo, on the Big Island, featuring a number of prayers translated into Hawaiian.  Hawaii has given a lot to me, and this site is a small way of saying mahalo, thank you.

This is a short healing prayer from the Hawaiian site.  These prayers are all rendered as graphics, so casual readers could avoid font download challenges and still view the diacritical characters considered essential for modern written Hawaiian.  This was something of a breakthrough for me, to create an entirely graphics-dependent site; I'm usually the person on a dev team lobbying for doing fancy things to text with stylesheets so load times stay down.  And again here on my home page, look at all the pictures; it's probably the most illustrated site I've ever done.  Must be a phase I'm going through.

This page is from Bahá'í Guriguri, Bahá'í Prayers in Hiri Motu.  This pidgin language is one of the national languages of Papua New Guinea, and to my knowledge this is the first multi-page site in Hiri Motu created for the web.  As seems to happen with these things, a friend from PNG sent me the text of the prayers electronically and I did my best to render them.  By way of an experiment, I did the layout for this site using stylesheet positioning instead of tables; there is only one HTML table in the entire site.

Here is my favorite page from the English site, the Tablet of the Holy Mariner.  This long scripture has a call-and-response style, with a short refrain repeated after each passage.  I set the refrain text in a different color, and it made the prayer sing on the page.  I used this image of the moon (as seen filtered through the Earth's atmosphere from the space shuttle) as the small icon you see in IE's favorites menu when you bookmark the home page.  This is a long prayer, with beautiful allusions and imagery.  Come to this page with patience and a quiet mind and you'll find an example of Bahá'u'lláh's most sublime and mystical writing.