Zestivals.com is an online community built around music festivals and serves as a revenue generating platform for publishers and advertisers alike. Structured around social content, Zestivals.com promises to be a one-stop resource for news, updates, blogs and media for the most popular music festivals around the world.
Zestivals.com knew that building a robust social media platform required using a firm who possessed specialized knowledge of user behavior, advertising psychology, and online media trends. In response to this need, Ciphent built a platform that was designed to maximize the impact of all created material generated by publishers. With a release target of May 2008, Ciphent built Zestivals.com from scratch by coupling the full potential of a fully customizable Drupal platform with the freedom, control and transparency that OpenX technology promises.
The methodology was simple: the best sites cannot write all of the content themselves. In the case of Zestivals.com, Ciphent devised a specific strategy to maximize publishers’ return on their investments threefold. First, user-generated content and search engine optimization drive more traffic to this platform than any other platform. Second, the main subject matter is driven by publishers who write expert content in editorial fashion that is, in turn, supported by user material. This produces instant credibility for publishers, who are exposed to and can collaborate with an audience who is directly interested in the topics they explore. Third, using Open X – an sophisticated open source ad server used by more than 30,000 web publishers in over 100 countries – publishers can capitalize on ad revenue while getting everything they need to manage their online advertising.
Zestivals.com is a showcase for Ciphent’s integration and extension of Open X and Drupal platforms as mechanisms for social media. Structured around social content and incorporating a full bevy of features, the Platform delivers the following functionality:
· User Galleries: Support for users to upload photos, tag them, sort and browse through all images across the website
· Social Networking: Full feature set of user profiles, friend/group functionality, private messaging
· Blog Platform: Fully realized blogging platform for all users with promotion of content, voting, social bookmarking, custom templates, and commenting
· Forums: Allows for an outlet of user driven information and interactivity with custom topics, commenting, flagging of inappropriate content integration with user profiles, etc.
· Simplified Administration: Simple, graphic-based administration menus allow for ease and comfort of content control
· Wiki: Content driven and user-monitored/edited wiki generated from the website
· SEO Friendly: Appropriate page markup, URL structure, Title structure, meta tags, content generation, content repurposing, semantic web, and content display
· Inline Dictionary/Word Linker- Automatic generation of cross-linking and content generation based on definable settings
· OpenX Integration: Fully integrated with OpenX ad serving application to manage adspaces, campaigns, ad tracking, and monetization of targeted space
· Configurable Registration Wall: Control of user accounts and user access based on roles and registration information
· Media Integration: Custom integration of rich-media content
Currently in the pre-alpha stage, Zestivals is accepting member sign-ups, which gives its users privileges to post commentaries, create profiles, interact in the forums, and blog on topics relevant to their musical interests.