Zimma Web Development

Here’s a round up of what’s been keeping us busy lately:

Innovation Artist Management (IAM) - DJ Agency Booking System
We have developed a bespoke solution for IAM which manages all their DJ bookings, enquiries, invoicing and reminders. We will do a full write up with screenshots soon.

VCA Technology - Software license administration system
VCA technology build intelligent video content analysis software. Since building their website in 2007, we’ve built a bespoke system that allows their customers to download software license keys. An integrated reporting engine allows VCA to build custom reports and download them at regular intervals. We’ve also built in an API so that licenses can be allocated automatically on production lines with no human interaction.

Ganesh Retreats - Website build and CMS integration
The team at Ganesh Retreats needed a website solution that would perform well in search engines and keep up to date themselves. Powered by the Zimma CMS, check out their website at http://www.ganeshretreats.com/

Community Resolve - Website build and CMS integration
Community resolve have a brand new website. This website contains a variety of page styles which required new template functionality to built into the CMS. See their website at http://www.communityresolve.org.uk/.

Patwa - CMS integration
Derek at Patwa already had a lovely website designed by himself but updating it was a challenge. We took what he already and integrated the Zimma CMS.
Derek says “Zimma recently implemented a CMS for my website which I am really please with, it is simple, intuitive and quick to use. They customised the system to make it work well for my design business, so now I can concentrate on being a creative and not have to get lost in the world of code!”.
See http://www.patwa.co.uk/

ForgetMeNot Software and ForgetMeNot Africa - CMS integration and Wordpress customisation
FMNSoft and FMNA both had working websites but couldn’t keep them up to date themselves. We integrated our CMS and set them up with customised Wordpress blogs.  http://www.fmnsoft.com/ and http://www.forgetmenotafrica.com/

TheTicketSellers - Lots of new functionality
Lots of new bits and pieces have been integrated into TheTicketSellers including

• A guestlist system that allows promoters to add free tickets for their guests on to their e-ticket lists. This saves them having to have separate lists for their tickets and their guests.
• A newsletter tool to allow staff at TheTicketSellers to easily create newsletters based on the events on sale.
• Discount system so that events can have discounted or buy one get one free offers.
• An accounting system allows them to download full financial summaries of everything going in and out.

Last night James Max on LBC (London’s Biggest Conversation) was discussing Search Engine Optimisation and had two experts on hand to answer peoples questions.

There seemed to be a pattern of people phoning up saying “I’ve got my website built, now what about search engines?”.

I phoned up to offer my advice that Search Engine Optimisation shouldn’t be an after thought but something that’s considered and built in to any website right from the start.

If your website doesn’t work effectively with search engines you are missing out on one of the most important traffic sources.

When customers of TheTicketSellers purchase tickets they now have the option of posting the details to their Facebook profile, allowing friends to see what event they are going to and giving them a link to buy tickets.

This adds value for the customer because they can easily let their friends know about the event and encourage them to come along. It allows TheTicketSellers to reach their customers friends in a helpful and non intrusive way.

Friends can then comment on the post which goes even further to create hype and awareness for the event.

Here’s how it works:

After a customer has compoleted their order they can “Connect” with facebook and publish the story:

The story features on their profile page and in their friends’ news feeds. Friends can comment on the post.

Facebook Connect is a fantastic example of how social networking can be used effectively in business.

We are very proud to see the Shambala Festival Website scoring a fantastic 4 out of 5 in Web User Magazine last fortnight. Click on the image below to read the review.

It’s been a long time in the making but it’s finally all there. That is the all new Shambala Festival 2009 Website.

To quote the website, here’s a bit of background about Shambala Festival:

We see Shambala as a creative, non-commercial, ethical and family-friendly festival with a wild side. We have endeavoured to cultivate  a down-to-earth mix of creativity, the unexpected, a warm & friendly atmosphere, and quality entertainment.

As well as building the site and integrating the Zimma CMS system here are some of the other features we have developed for this project:

The Flickr / Spry photo gallery

Over the years, Shambalians have added their photos to the Shambala flickr groups and this makes up the Shambala photo gallery. You can select a year, photographer or highlight and the relevant photos will be pulled in from flickr.

Some of the galleries contain hundreds of photos and to make this more manageable we’ve integrated the Spry Ajax framework. Using this we could paginate the gallery results, add some neat transitions between gallery pages but best of all, hold off loading the full set of images and load each page as it is viewed saving on bandwidth and load times. Click here to see it in action.

The Shambala Community Forum

In the upcoming weeks to the big weekend people are getting excited and where to better to let it all out than the forum. For this we customised a vanilla forum which has done the job perfectly and in particular, it’s the simplicity that lots of people like. Here’s a comment from the forum

Well the fact that I got this far suggests its working OK. Hate it when theres too many pages to work through to get onto a forum site. So thanks for simplicity. Mike M

Ticketing white label

For buying tickets, we used TheTicketSellers white label functionality we had already built. Clicking through to buy tickets seamlessly takes you to TheTicketSellers but you wouldn’t know it. See the ticket page here.

Carbon offset calculator

Winners of the “Most sustainable event of 2008″ and the “Outstanding Green Award” last year, the festival is very conscious of it’s carbon footprint. This year they have introduced a carbon offset calculator that Zimma built and integrated into the buying process. A customer only needs to enter their postcode and it calculates an estimated amount of CO2 based on  their distance form the festival. You can read more about how they are using the money here: http://shambalafestival.org/about-us/sustainability/#offsetting-your-travel-explained

Zimma have also developed a crew ticket management system for the festival in conjunction with TheTicketSellers. More on that to come soon…

The Zimma CMS, ZCMS is now being used across a variety of our websites including Shambala Festival, Navy Roof and VCA Technology, to name a few as well as many more currently being developed.

At the moment, in response to its popularity, we are starting to white label the CMS so other companies can take advantage of the CMS and sell it as their own.

The CMS can adapt to websites of all shapes and sizes and keeps the content management process simple and secure. Some of the important features we’ve developed include:

Bespoke content types
A title and text area isn’t sufficient for most content types. We can break a piece of content up into its constituent parts to present the content editor with a simple form to enter information.

Previewing content before publishing
A content manager is rarely going to get their content posts ready for publishing in one session so the ZCMS allows you to save any content posts and preview them without publishing.

Multiple users, multiple sites
A website often has more than one person in charge of the content. And one person can often be in charge of more than one website. The ZCMS allows any number of users to manage any number of sites as well as the possiblity to restrict functionality for particular users.

Custom Tooltips
For each field in a content item a “tip” can be set up to help the user enter their content.

Besides these there are lots more great features and  improvements are being developed all the time.

We’ve now opened up the CMS to be white labelled so that organistations can brand it as their own, theme it in a company style and even add their own introduction messages and help sheets. If this sounds interesting to you, please give us a call on 0207 193 7027.

We are looking for a passionate and innovative web developer with a good understanding of the following languages, concepts and techniques:

- PHP
- MySql
- JavaScript
- HTML/CSS
- AJAX
- OOP

You will play a key role in a range of projects as well as becoming a Zend certified PHP engineer.

Please submit a CV and covering letter to mail@zimma.co.uk

Zimma Web Development is an equal opportunities employer.

Absolutely no agencies.

We’ve recently been working on a couple of projects that involve integrating hotel deals using the Laterooms affiliate program. This allows websites to offer hotel deals to their visitors and earn a slice of commission in the process.

TheTicketSellers

When an order is made on TheTicketSellers website the customer receives email confirmation and we spent some time rejigging this recently to provide the customer with more useful information. It seemed like the perfect place to include hotel listings as we know the customer is going to a particular event and we know where the event is so we can offer them deals on hotels near the event.

We ran into a couple of problems along the way.

The largest problem was that the XML feed provided by Laterooms that gives us all the latest prices can be unreliable. Expecting it to be available every time an order confirmation is sent would not be a good idea. So, we grab all the info early in the morning, store in a database and it can then be used throughout the rest of the day.

As we are relating the hotels to an event we needed to work out which hotels were close to the venue at which the event is being held. Whilst Laterooms provide the longitude and latitude of every hotel, we only have the postcode for the venue so a little bit of translation is needed to get a similar value for the hotel. We then use a long formula (essentially Pythagorean theorem adjusted to account for the curvature of the earth) to calculate the distances between the two points. This allows us to list all the hotels in order of how far they are from the venue.

Visit North West

Visit North West is a tourist information site for, you guessed it, the north west. Zimma recenlty helped them with their Laterooms hotel integrations so they had more flexibility and more efficient scripts.

Previously they were running off the Laterooms XML feed which meant page load times could be painful especially on pages that list hundreds of hotels.

Now, by using the database buffering technique used in TheTicketSellers example, it can serve the hotels without having to access the XML all the time or worry about whether the XML is available or not.

VNW also use their own hotel descriptions (as opposed to those provided by Laterooms) and combine this with information from the Laterooms CSV. Zimma set them up with a control panel that allows them to upload their own CSV files and Laterooms CSV files so they can serve information about the hotels from all three sources at once.

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If you have a website which you think would benefit from listing tempting hotel deals and make money along the way then get in touch to see how we can help. We also offer restaurant and cinema listings integration services.

If you’re feeling lucky this Christmas why not enter a competition to Win A House. We’ve just built a mini site for Redwood Events who have their house up for grabs. Here’s little bit about why…

We thought we could create an opportunity for a lucky person to win our home and sell our house a little more quickly. That way, we can all have a bit of fun and do Something a bit different from the normal house-selling process.

Have a look for yourself

This morning I took the Zend PHP Exam and passed which means I’m now officially a certified PHP engineer. How exciting!

There haven’t been many posts on the blog lately but that’s not to say we haven’t been busy.

A new logo, website and general look for Zimma is on its way for the new year.

A recent project is the white labelling and seating plan system for TheTicketSellers, you’ll soon see this white labelling in place on the temporary Shambala Festival 2009 website when it launches very shortly.

We’ve built the new website for the British Society of Orthopaedic Anaesthetists. This website includes a member system where members can use forums, upload and download resources and register for events. Full write up on this coming soon.

A new section on the Navy Roof website went live earlier this week all about Indian property rentals. Expect to see a blog arriving there soon too.

We’ve built a loveley JavaScript driven gallery page for Nila Design.

More coming soon…