Web Development

Web Presence Design

Your web presence is a reflection of yourself, your organization and everything that it represents. Your web publishing platform determines how well, how fast and in what format your story will be told. Having an excellence presence on the internet today can raise the awareness of causes, products, services or even provide opportunities to create new ones.  A well designed web presence can increase sales, profitability, propagate brand awareness and allow you to make the news with the click of a button instantly distributing content to anyone.  The software available has become lightweight, rapid and open source. The barrier to entry to getting started publishing content online has decreased as the number of people on the internet has lept astoundingly. End users and normal non-technical individuals have become more empowered to contribute content (images, videos, audio, text, etc) instantly, joining in, participating in citizen journalism and engaging in public conversation.  The webscape of design has changed significantly over the last decade and evolved past simply having one centralized website.  People are creating more socially integrated and decentralized web presences that span multiple domains, social networks, microsites, web services, blogs and content sharing sites.  Each of these pieces together compose your web presence and are part of your digital identity.  Web design has transformed into web presence design in a post new media era where everything is becoming digitized and socialized.  Having a excellent social web presence is not optional for organizations in the 21st century, it is a requirement.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Zero Strategist takes a holistic approach to search engine optimization that will help you, your products, services, causes, and mission get discovered online. We take a unique approach using a comprehensive combination of content, linking, social media, metadata and optimized web presence design strategies to help raise your web presence in organic search rankings (unpaid) giving you the visibility needed over time to get you found by those searching for you. So what does holistic search optimization mean? One big thing most people don’t understand and most search marketers don’t want you to know is that if you have a well rounded web site that is designed excellently from beginning, you should do pretty well with search. If you take a holistic approach to your entire web presence from the start, you should already have search in mind before you build anything. Others care about selling you “one size fits all” or specific technologies because they benefit from it, but at ZS we take the opposite approach. Every SEO solution we architect is custom because so is your organization, company, industry, geography, people, services and products. Search is about understanding language, the psychology of how people think about things so words really do matter and to us search optimization is like digital poetry. What we care about is writing the right digital search poem so that when people look for you in search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, that they can find you in organic search and get to what they are looking for fast! The reason why having an excellent search optimized web presence is so important is because being found in search more frequently can mean significant increases in business leads, conversions, sales and general awareness in your industry, field or geography. If you make the best thing in the world and no one knows it exists…then for all intensive purposes it doesn’t! Get your SEO strategy started and get found.

WordPress CMS

WordPress has bloomed into a fully featured semantic social content management system.  WP is free.  WordPress is not just a CMS platform it is also a global open source community. WP 3+ added a completely re-engineered “the loop” and added custom post types expanding WordPress’s range of capabilities. The ecosystem of themes and plugins (both free and premium) has continued to grow as well extending functionality in many directions (everything from social media to e-commerce). WP now powers over 13% of all the websites that exist on the Internet making it the worlds most popular CMS. The excellent usability and easy interface of WordPress has empowered users of with little to no technical experience to create, syndicate and publish content to the web instantly.  Never heard of WordPress? Well chances are you have seen websites build with WordPress like TIME, Mashable, ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, Yahoo!, Ford, Problogger, Silent Bob Speaks, WSJ, Beer & Blog, TechCrunch, Mozilla, People Magazine, ARMY, CNN, Lexus, GigaOM, NFL, Star Wars, MTV, Sony, LIVESTRONG, ZDNet, eBay, NASA the list goes on and on. There are thirteen million reasons why you should choose WordPress as a web solution and join the publication revolution!

Drupal CMS

Drupal is a free, modular, scaleable and powerful open source solution used to power tens of thousand community websites.  Drupal 7 was released in 2011 with even more features directly integrated into the core platform after two and half years of intensive development by a diverse global community of developers.  D7 is picking up even more momentum and it’s flexible modularity is making it a go to choice for creating amazing community and membership sites. Drupal is rapid to develop, sporting over 6,000 add on modules, has powerful user interface options and an easy to use social publishing infrastructure.  The real-time security and multi-site network capabilities also make it an attractive CMS option to many organizations seeking to build vast and secure social networks.  Drupal is driven by the solid LAMP stack of open source technologies – PHP, MySQL, Apache, and GNU/Linux.  Most importantly it has a thriving global development community and it’s burgeoning popularity has meant even more code contributions.  You have probably already seen Drupal in action running well known sites such as The Economist, TNR, White House.gov, Harvard, Mother Jones, Grammy.com, Now Public, Portland State University, MIT, New York Observer, Popular Science, TWiT, Warner Brothers Records, Ubuntu, Fast Company, Amnesty International, Forbes and countless others.  Join the community and elevate you web presence capabilities, get Drupal!

Theme & Template Customization

Themes and templates are powerful tools to help you create the right combination of style, colors, layouts, fonts, functions, images, videos, graphics, menus and effects that will let your visiters, users and competition know exactly what your organization is all about.   The open market of premium themes for both WordPress and Drupal has grown greatly in recent years.  The number of ways to display, present and interact with content is endless.   From photo driven portfolios, to multi-author blog networks, newspapers/magazines, consulting, e-commerce shopping, video sharing, event style sites, there is something for everyone.  Zero Strategist has spent hundreds of hours researching, installing, testing, modifying, configuring, curating a variety of high quality premium/free WordPress themes and Drupal templates.  All templates vary in quality and functionality, picking the wrong one will cost you time and money.  Theming is an art that requires not just knowledge of how to simply install a theme, but knowing the CMS, the content that will go in the theme, how to format it, identifying the functionalities needed, an adept eye for topography and graphics.  Zero Strategist will help you find the template that will work for you within your budget, make it do what it needs to do and if one does not already exist that meets requirements then we will build it.

E-Commerce

Having the ability sell products and services online is a critical capability even for small business. Over the past decade e-commerce has become a preferred method of customers who are becoming more conscious about use of paper and sustainable practices. From WP E-Commerce to Ubercart to Magento, Zero Strategist has you covered.  Whether you need to integrate a simple web cart into your website or create a complicated and extensive web store we can help you setup your products for sale online by helping select the right solution at the right budget.  Get started selling your products and services over the web, give your customers the options they want.  Let them purchase what then want when they need it.

Web Analytics

Web metrics can help you get answers about who is coming to your site and why, which helps you ask more relevant questions about how your web presence should be designed. Having more in depth knowledge of what is happening with your web presence leads to better business decisions. Be Metrics Minded, Track ROI. At Zero Strategist we are metrics minded. We like to understand what is happen on the web, figuring out how and why it is happening is just part of what we do! Web analytics is not just about seeing the “traffic” behind your website in numbers and graphs — it is about understanding the nature and behavior of your audience, adjusting your strategy to meet your objectives. At the center of your metrics and all of those numbers are online communities. With our understanding of web metrics, we can create for you an even better web presences and user experiences! From simple Google Analytics tracking installations to heavy duty social media monitoring platforms, we will help you determine the right solution for your budget. Track More Then Just Web Traffic. As websites have evolved to be social and increasingly distributed (a Twitter account over there, a Facebook page over here) they have grown into diffuse web presences. This has changed the way metrics are captured and introduced new measures into the web analytics spectrum. Tracking web traffic is just one piece, today you need to be tracking things like your RSS Feed Subscriptions, Email Campaigns, Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans, Blog Comments, articles and news stories on your organization, products and services. It is easy to get lost in the sea of information start tracking your web analytics.

Site Assessments

Having a comprehensive website assessment done is a great way to enhance your web presence by identifying actionable recommendations that can help you systematically improve your virtual assets. From search optimization to taxonomy analysis our assessments are thorough and will help you get more out of your web presence.