Informational Websites
ZDCA has been designing and developing informational websites – sites that provide dynamic information in an elegant and ultimately user friendly manner – collectively since 2009. Our unique aesthetic, unwavering attention to detail, astonishingly high expectations, deep passion for what we produce and ultimate belief in the work of our clients is a particularly successful combination when choosing our projects.
Below you will find an ever-increasing list of projects that we are particularly proud of for a group of clients whose clear passion resonates with our own commitment to do great work.
Please visit our case studies section for more in-depth conversations about design and development at ZDCA.
Visit HopMonk Tavern website
Project Name: HopMonk Tavern
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: HopMonk Tavern is one of the North SF Bay Area’s premier destinations for great beer, delicious food and stellar music. The business is the creation of Dean Biersch, co-founder of internationally renowned beer and restaurants, Gordon Biersch. Once the HopMonk in Sebastopol was thriving, Dean expanded to open the new HopMonk Sonoma, which quickly became the new wine country hot spot of Sonoma. In 2013, Dean opened a third location in Novato with a new music venue, the Session Room.
HopMonk and the website ZDCA built for the Tavern family are a huge cultural force in Sonoma County, featuring:
- One website for three distinct locations
- Daily and nightly live music with internationally known performers in multiple stages at each location
- Rapid ticket sales
- Large events for hundreds of guests
- Spacious and unique indoor / outdoor facilities
- Extensive beer, wine, and spirits menu
- Excellent food and desserts beyond mere “pub fare”
- Fine catering
The list goes on! To accommodate, a large-scale informational website was built with much graphic and interactive customization that included disparate navigation menus for all three locations including: custom session variables for keeping the location constant; multiple galleries in two dramatic formats; custom built performer information feeds directly from the ticketing service to display on the website so the client does not enter info twice; food and drink menus that can be updated easily without resorting to PDFs; and so much more.
ZDCA also launched a completely HTML5/CSS3 compliant mobile site to welcome the third location.
Read more about our design and development of the HopMonk website in our case study portfolio.
Visit William McDonough website
Project Name: William McDonough
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: William McDonough’s new website was another purely implementation project from wireframes and complete PSDs created by the talented Havas Worldwide design team. This time, however, we worked with the Information Architecture team initially to find an adequate pre-developed theme that the design team then customized for McDonough. We then re-skinned and took the pre-loaded theme to the next level in meeting the demands of the design and functionality requests.
We customized many parts of the site, including the events section, we created complex hero slider functionality with some embedded JQuery slideshow magic and a unique tag cloud in the home page slideshow, the homepage grid blocks are completely curatable by the user based upon positioning as well as pulling automatically from various sections of the site (depending upon the grid block), and we created complex page templates to handle the design requests for McDonough’s book pages, for example. The result is a beautiful, high-functioning website that is completely updatable by the McDonough team.
Read about our other website design and development projects in our case study portfolio.
Visit Tintin website
Project Name: The Adventures of Tintin
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: We were hired to complete the functional build of the new, English language site for The Adventures of Tintin – the informational and commercial arm of Moulinsart’s international family of sites devoted to the intrepid detective stories.
The website design was provided for us by the artists at Havas Worldwide San Francisco (one of the world’s most highly respected and active design, web development and marketing firms), and we were tasked with developing an elegant, functional informational website of their design vision with a few specific moving parts and a minor API connection to their Amazon store component. Unlike most of our websites, this was one of the first site build-only projects that we’ve managed here at ZDCA, and it was a complete success.
We started with a very spartan theme with some important options pre-loaded and built a completely custom theme for Tintin out of the designs provided by Havas. We added custom front-end components (like the homepage hero slideshow and the adventure page slider, among others), and built all of the page templates to spec from scratch. There are many layers of shortcode and page template complexity, and the result is a clean and highly functional website built completely to spec from their designs.
Read more about our development of the Tintin website in our case study portfolio.
Visit Mosaic Art NOW website
Project Name: Mosaic Art NOW
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: Mosaic Art NOW was a project as dynamic and creative as the site’s producer, Nancie Mills-Pipgras. Having worked with Nancie before on the MAN magazine layout, we were excited to jump on a new and larger project that would again offer creative challenges to match Nancie’s ideas and energy.
We wanted the site to be at once full of rich content and interactivity to accommodate the wide range of mosaic art and artists, but also maintain a modern simplicity and ease of use. Most important, the theme had to remain responsive to a wide variety of screen sizes throughout a wide array of customizations. The new website development project produced a world-class home for mosaic art.
We accomplished this through a combination of advanced premium plugins for WordPress and deep customizations of both plugins and template files. The result is a varied but matched approach to content display. Examples include a custom Artists page with a flexible grid of dozens of images with larger rollover views. Another are the archives of article categories and their mason style layout of interlocking blocks of previews images and excerpts. Yet another is the homepage with multiple blocks of featured and other content incorporating sliding elements to hide content until requested and social media integration such as Nancie’s current Tweets and more.
Additionally, Nancie’s readership favors email newsletters. A custom programmed email template system allows Nancie to pick featured articles from all posts within the WordPress admin and write special descriptions before automatically posting the newsletter to her favorite email marketing software to send the final message.
Lastly, a critical step of the project was importing some 300 complete posts with thousands of images from her previous platform at Blogspot. We successfully imported all posts and images, plus cleansed a cluttered database from years of both changes in HTML practices and the code updates from Blogspot.
Read more about the design and development of Mosaic Art Now in our case study portfolio.
Visit GoLocal website
Project Name: Sonoma County GoLocal
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: Since becoming a consumer cooperative in 2008, GoLocal has been incredibly successful in driving business to local companies in the Sonoma County region. Their stickers can be spotted in store windows from Petaluma to Cloverdale. So when it came time to update the look of their website, it was only fitting that they went local.
Redesigning the GoLocal website was a chance for ZDCA to flex its user interface and user experience (UI/UX) muscles. GoLocal had a creative vision and some samples of websites they liked, but gave ZDCA a wide artistic license to apply our own design aesthetic. The result: dramatically improved features and intuitiveness via a brand-new web interface and front-end design that integrates painlessly with the website’s preexisting back-end.
In addition to UI/UX, the GoLocal project also offered an opportunity for ZDCA to eschew bits and bytes in favor of good old-fashioned wood pulp by creating a fold-out infographic for the North Bay Bohemian, a local weekly newspaper. We carefully matched the design of the GoLocal website, while ensuring that the infographic was optimized for viewing on paper rather than a screen.
Visit Phutureprimitive website
Project Name: Phutureprimitive
Project Type: Informational Website
Project Details: As a popular world-touring songwriter and producer, Rain of Phutureprimitive was looking for a reboot of his brand and website.
Rain came to ZDCA with a vision of graphics and style that matches his market and music. Original art was created and a custom events-oriented WordPress website was developed that remains simple to use for a busy producer on the road.
Additionally, to accommodate rising mobile and tablet viewership, the theme is responsive to display well on most any screen size. We were thrilled to work with such a rising star in the world of electronic dance music and truly enjoyed working with Rain.
Read more about our website design and development projects in our case study portfolio.