Zimma Web Development

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…

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.

A ‘new media’ agency based in London needed a Content Management System (CMS) for their client websites and asked Zimma to develop it. Having already developed a CMS for my own clients I knew the complications and potential pitfalls.

In order to make a good CMS it must meet the following points:

Easy to use.
The point of a CMS is to allow anyone to update a website.

Cope with various types of websites.
All websites are different so designing a CMS with just one site in mind would not work.

Cope with various types of content.
A website can be the container for many types of content so a CMS must be able to adapt in order to handle it.

Be extensible.
Web technology and website styles move fast. A good CMS must be easily extendible to last any time.

The final system meets all these points and has since been integrated in to many sites. Other essential features included in the system are a PDF generator (allowing users to generate PDFs from templates), a file manager to organise uploaded files and images, the ability to preview any content posts before publishing as well as being able to roll back to any content post in the past.

“The CMS system Zimma built is robust, flexible, reliable and extensible. The project was delivered on time and to budget. We are very happy with the final system. Zimma provided excellent support during the first months of operation.”

Agency Director

TheTicketSellers.co.uk is an online ticket agency. Their online presence has grown tremendously since the first version of website in 2006 and sells tickets for a wide range of events from Drum & Bass Arena to Moseley Folk Festival.

The people at TheTicketSellers are always willing to incorporate new ideas and technology to make sure the customers and promoters that use their services are always very happy.

This website is much more than a website and is probably better descibed as a system. I’m going to break it down into the three types of user so you can a better idea of what I have built for them.

CUSTOMERS - The people who buy the tickets

TheTicketSellers site makes it very simple for customers to purchase tickets. Here are a few of the best features:

• Predictive search feature which suggests events as you type
• SMS e-ticket delivery. Customers can have their e-tickets sent to their mobile by text message.
• Customer account area where customers can log in check delivery status on their open orders and check past orders.

PROMOTERS - The people who have the tickets to sell

Promoters have their login area of the site where they can

• add new events
• manage their existing events
• check on ticket sales
• check graphical statistics about their customers
• print out their e-ticket doorlist at the end of the event
• create links and buttons for their events
• update their public profile and payment preferences

STAFF - The people who sell the tickets

TheTicketSellers also have a 24 hour phone line and all orders taken over the phone are made through a staff control panel. This control panel also allows the staff to manage

• user accounts
• past orders
• venues and events
• invoice generation
• paper ticket postage
• banner adverts

VCA Technology develop intelligent video analysis software that extracts business value from any CCTV installation. Zimma helped out with their website, branding and logo.

Many logo design ideas were developed which incorporated a security camera / video surveillance theme. You can see some of these ideas and the final logo below. Everybody was pleased with the final logo and, using this as a base, the website design followed naturally.

The website needed to explain a bit about the company and demonstrate their software. This website uses an embedded media player to show off how their technology works. See the the home page for an example.

“I am very pleased with Zimma’s work and the resulting www.vcatechnology.com web site. I found Zimma staff to be helpful and cooperative at all times and I appreciated the additional effort in the final stages that resulted in the web site going live exactly on schedule.”
Geoff Thiel, CEO, VCA Technology Ltd

Zimma have rebuilt the Making Short Films website to accompany the latest version of the best seller text book Making Short Films by Clifford Thurlow. I really like this clean and fresh looking design and think it really appeals to the primary user - media students. As with all websites it’s important it performs well in Google so that when people search for Making Short Films they end up here. Web User magazine featured this in their best new websites section in March 2008.

Navyroof.com Ltd. (UK) is an independent property investment company and approached Zimma to build their online presence. They needed a professional website they could they could manage themselves. The site has now been online since March 2008 and is currently undergoing further development to cope with their growth. Click the tumbnail to view their website.