Digital Strategy

The PSTA is a postgraduate arts college founded by HRH The Prince of Wales. The prestigious college features many outreach programmes and teaches the practical aspects of many global art styles.

The Brief

The PSTA’s previous web developer of choice ceased trading, leaving their eCommerce platform “Mothership” unsupported. Their site was also beginning to lose functionality due to back-end errors piling up, with the PSTA needing us to do the following:

• Add ability to handle all aspects of customer transactions from a single point
• Take proactive steps to ensure the site and server were secure
• Eliminate the technical debts causing errors with the booking, payment, and notification systems
• Add new pages and calls-to-action for booking art courses
• Redesign and optimise the homepage

The Result

We integrated their server with both our performance monitoring and security intrusion detection systems and installed ClamAV anti-virus on their server, as well as implementing IP based restrictions to admin pages. We debugged and fixed all backend issues, including the email server configuration. We reordered their homepage to make the shopping cart more pronounced and the user journeys more clear.

Zodiac Media was also made responsible for all website maintenance going forwards.

Chococo have been making fine fresh handmade chocolates since 2002. They were one of the first artisan chocolatiers to lead the way in making truly fresh chocolates, using locally sourced seasonal ingredients blended with fine origin chocolate. The have won many regional, national, and international awards since opening their doors.

Our Involvement

Chococo came to us to help optimise their Magento eCommerce site and provide a hosting solution. This included:

• Updating the site to the latest version of Magento for added security
• Integrate Sage Pay online payments into the checkout process
• Making sure the site had lightning-fast response times
• Streamlining the checkout process down to one page
• Implemented form prediction using PCAPredict to further streamline the purchasing process
• Patched security holes that had led to cyber-attacks in the past

Since then we have been providing daily maintenance for them, with our team of developers only a phone-call away should they need any issues checked.

End of Line Golf are one of the UK’s leading suppliers of quality discounted golf equipment. Selling equipment from some of the top brands in the golfing industry, they are a one stop shop for all golfing needs.

The Brief

End of Line Golf wanted a website that would:

• Demonstrate their offerings clearly, using a naming convention that would generate, intrigue and also enhance their customer engagement with the products on offer
• Be fully responsive and function across multiple devices
• Ensure that the user journey was simple and easy to traverse

The Result

We worked with the End of Line Golf team to create a site that would truly engage. We decided to build this site using OpenCart, due to it being a powerful open-source eCommerce system that is designed to be feature rich and user-friendly, and was suitable for the client budget. We went about creating the website and ensured that it had high usability and that the customer journey to purchase goods was as simple as possible. The end result was a new website design that is pleasing to the eye, consistent, and relevant to what the company stands for.

Street Smart Property Ltd. work hard to make every aspect of moving home easier, more cost-effective, and stress-free. They aim to provide a better service than high street estate agencies, advertising customer properties on all the best websites including Rightmove, Zoopla, and Primelocation.

The Brief

The most important requests for the new Street Smart website were

• To ensure that users could quickly and easily find the information they were looking for
• To provide clear routes of discovery of available properties, whilst encouraging and enhancing user engagement
• To have an extremely user-friendly interface that would ensure editors could concentrate on publishing great content without having to worry about page layout or styling issues

The Result

Drupal 7 was our preferred choice of content management system because of its open-source code and extensibility, meaning that the client could have complete control over the site and that it would be fast and robust out of the box. It would also allow inexperienced users to easily update the site content thereby reducing training overheads. The new website uses a responsive design to optimise the user viewing experience, meaning that even if they are on a desktop, tablet or mobile device, they are always viewing the website at its best.

The goal of this project was to build an accessible, fully-responsive Drupal 8 website build on behalf of Lambeth Council.

The Brief

Lambeth Council asked us to create a new website for their twinned "Adults" and "Children" Safeguarding Boards. The Safeguarding Boards are two separate organisations but both have the same objective of protecting vulnerable individuals from abuse and neglect.

The Safeguarding Boards required a site that would be:

• Easy to update and maintain
• Mobile friendly
• Accessible to a WCAG 2.0 AA standard

One of the Safeguarding Boards already had a legacy Drupal 6 site so their staff were comfortable with using Drupal as a Content Management System (CMS).

The Result

Based on Lambeth Council’s requirements we decided to build their website using the Drupal 8 CMS. Drupal 8 is the latest version of Drupal and will be future-proofed for years to come. The platform allows for content to be edited in-place on the frontend of the website rather than from a backend admin panel. The editor uses a "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) format for ease of use. A one day training workshop was provided by us to introduce staff on how to use the new site.

The site was built using a "mobile-first" approach – designing, developing and testing for mobile devices first and then progressing on to tablet and desktop devices. This approach to building websites is the strongest way to implement responsive design and guarantees visitors using mobile devices will have a first class experience.

To help smooth the transition and reduce training times, we integrated three different 3^rd party modules and the pre-existing Google Custom Search instance the staff had been using in the past into the new site.

All our websites are developed with accessibility in mind but the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standard set a very high bar for the project. We iteratively re-tested the site against the WCAG 2.0 AA standard as we worked, to ensure that both our design and code choices met this very high accessibility standard.

The resulting website is future-proof, well structured, and fully-responsive. The site caters for its many disparate visitor types whilst allowing them to find the safeguarding information they need quickly and efficiently.

This site will go live in the coming weeks.

Voice Squad represents some of the best voice-over artists in the UK, both in English and foreign languages. They have an extensive portfolio of high-calibre artists from all over the world who are UK-based. They provide voices for TV and radio commercials, corporate films, animation, audio-books, and many other forms of media.

The Brief

Zodiac Media were tasked with implementing a complete redesign of the site, including:

• Adding shortlisting and filter-by-artist functionality
• Implementing voice clip downloads and streaming
• Migrating the contents of one of Voice Squad's sister sites
• Mobile compatibility
• Optimising the site to increase search engine rankings

The Result

In order to migrate the new content, we had to synchronise the new sitemaps, add appropriate redirects and avoid any duplicate contents. The site was developed in WordPress to allow instant updates from the Voice Squad team, allowing them to change content and images as and when required.

The website was also built using a "mobile first" approach and was optimised for multiple device resolutions, with a clean and elegant look that is simultaneously modern and enterprising.

Zodiac Media designed and built Zodiac Booking to take some of the industry standard features available to large tour operators and makes them accessible to smaller companies that otherwise would not be able to afford bespoke development.

The Brief

• Provide cottage suppliers a platform for their customers to search, reserve, book, amend, and cancel their cottage and holiday bookings.
• Provide a fully transactional booking engine integrating the Carlton TABS API
• Optimised for mobile platforms

The Result

We implemented a feature-rich search engine and geo-location map search that could provide up-to-date availability and booking. A fully customisable content management system that allows even the least technical of people to manage their site with ease was designed from scratch using Symfony 2. The site is fully responsive and built from the ground up to look its best on every device.

Nabru have over eleven years of experience in manufacturing and retailing self-assembly sofas. In that time they have sold over 150,000 products and have serviced more than 50,000 customers. Nabru manufacture all of their sofas in the UK at their headquarters in the Greater London area.

The Brief

Zodiac Media has been involved with Nabru for nearly two years. During this time we have been tasked with:

• Undertaking a complete rebuild of the site’s frontend and a full backend code refactoring
• Replacing their mobile site
• Migrating all the legacy codebase
• Optimising the site to increase search engine rankings
• Optimising content so it appears correctly in Google Shopping results

The Result

Nabru wanted an online presence capable of handling whatever advances were thrown at it. As with all of our customers, we implemented all of our new changes in a test environment and then deployed the changes onto the live site without affecting the data in the live database or the customer experience. We built their new site using a "mobile-first" approach.  This meant that Nabru had a single website that could cater to multiple platforms, making it easier to maintain and update.

Nabru's diverse range of current and potential customers is always at the forefront of every decision. A very close relationship has been fostered through daily update emails and weekly meetings. This has allowed us to create as much transparency as possible, giving the client detailed knowledge about the status of the project at all times. We have had a great working relationship with the Nabru for many years, and have developed their website as they have changed and developed as an organisation.