Archnet, developed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, is an open-access resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues, with a particular focus on Muslim societies. Archnet presents visual and material culture within historic, cultural, and geographic contexts, and contains over 120,000 images, publications, video, and pedagogical tools.

In 2018, Performant took over maintenance, hosting, and support for Archnet. In 2020, when the Archnet team was ready for a major overhaul of the website, Performant took on the challenge of migrating the entire archive to a new platform, with a brand new front end, and a completely reimagined content management system.

Archnet NEXT, as the new version is called, launched in October of 2021, with a raft of new and improved features. First and foremost, it’s now fully responsive, meaning that the experience of using the site on a mobile device is on par with the experience of using it within a desktop computer browser.

In addition, we added an all-new browsing interface for all major content areas on the site, and we rearchitected and redesigned the search feature to make it much faster, cleaner and more capable, and able to respond to queries in many languages and scripts.

The site is now served from a globally distributed Content Delivery Network, so that pages load much faster, and there’s a great “near me” feature that uses your browser or device location (with your permission) to show you sites in your geographic vicinity (and without ever gathering your data of course)!

Click below to visit the new site (try it on a phone)! And drop us a line if you have a similar project we can work on with you.