Articles by Zone 5

Zone 5 is an award winning communications agency located in Albany, NY and San Jose, CA. As the only firm in the Northeast and on the West Coast (last time we checked) to provide integrated marketing, public communications, web development, graphic design, research, and exhibits production under one roof, Zone 5 is an industry innovator.

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Zone 5 has written 158 articles for AdTalk

Zone 5

Vanguard Designer Showcase Preview Party

by Zone 5

Zone 5 recently sponsored and hosted the preview party to kick-off the Vanguard Designer Showhouse event, which raises money for the Albany Symphony Orchestra.Kicking off the 2012 Designer ShowcaseThe annual Designer Showhouse is Vanguard’s major fundraiser. The visitors to the Showhouse have enjoyed seeing both historic homes in which beautiful decorative features from the past [...]

Reading Documentation

by Zone 5

I’m working on a complicated web application and being tripped up by the simplest of things. But I worked it out by reading other people’s documentation.If you’ve forgotten your password, you click on the “forgot my password” link. You put in your email address and click “Email new password.” It sends you an email, but [...]

Writing Documentation

by Zone 5

In a perfect world we’d be building simple websites with easily re-usable modules and plugins, written by people much more dedicated to their particular niches. This is reality, and sometimes we are building terribly complicated web applications with hordes of custom modules and plugins. Hordes: like the orcish armies in the Lord of the Rings. [...]

Creating a Conversation

by Zone 5

Join the conversation!You’ve seen this tagline before, right? A Google search on the phrase “join the conversation” returned 402,000,000 results, and counting. But don’t get me wrong; I’m not knocking it. I think it’s a lovely invitation. But have we really examined what it means? Do we know what we’re asking of people, and ourselves, [...]

Thinking Editorially

by Zone 5

I was at an AMA event the other day, chit-chatting with the folks at my table. Our job descriptions varied. Some were media buyers, and others concentrated on social media or public relations. I was the only one who specialized in websites.At one point, the conversation turned to what we majored in during college. Despite [...]

Video Content for the Web

by Zone 5

 Zone 5 StudioToday we held a mini filming session at Zone 5, with the aim of creating some new web content for one of our clients. It was a pretty straightforward shoot. We set up a studio in the corner of our big conference room. The backdrop was the projection screen. We used a basic 3-point lighting setup with diffusers, [...]

An Outline for Drupal Training

by Zone 5

Since the z5blitz has been backburnered, things have returned to normal. Today I am scheduled for a two hour Drupal training, and I’ve spent the morning writing up an outline to keep myself on track.Part One: Your ServerRHELApache (configs)DocumentRootMySQL (phpMyAdmin)PHP (ini)CRONreboot tuesdaydrupal cronyum updatesPart Two: DrupalUsersRolesPermissionsContentTypesEditorBuildingBlocksMenusModulesViewsConfigPerformanceInfoMaintenanceReportsStatusAvailable Updates 

Project Hewlett Martin: Day 2

by Zone 5

Project Hewlett Martin is my codename for the three sessions in which I try to teach two of our fabulous designers how to do CSS.This has been a long time coming. We need to be more web designers (not just print designers) and as such, we need to be more web savvy. They’ve been interested [...]

More on Project Fire Control: Separating Data and Code

by Zone 5

Code consists of modules, plugins, themes, templates, stylesheets, javascript libraries, and things like that. Code is meant to do something. Data consists of usernames, page content, settings, and things like that. Data is meant to be something.Code should live in files. Data should live in the database.As an example, I’d like to talk about CCK. [...]

Project Patton: Deciding Which CMS to Use

by Zone 5

Our current site is built with Drupal. I don’t know how or why that decision was made; it was before my time. I do know that it’s kind of like bringing a toolbox to the dinner table: sometimes all you really need is a fork and knife.There’s a lot to take into consideration this time [...]

z5blitz and Web Development

by Zone 5

We have embarked on a large, fast moving project. The outcome of which is to create a new website for Zone 5. The “blitz” part of this is the four days that have been set aside in April, at the end of which the new website will be live. Before that we’re doing as much [...]

Lunch Club

by Zone 5

When a favorite local lunch spot (Burrito Joe’s) closed it’s doors for good, our web developer, Ethan, wondered where he’d go for his Friday lunch. It was over a farewell burrito that he proposed the idea of a lunch club. “Do you think anyone would be interested in trying different places for lunch each Friday?” [...]

Attention higher ed community, Zone 5 has a new resource for you!

by Zone 5

Some of you will remember our Z5FocusEd ‘11 event, where we held a higher education interactive focus group with high school students and parents, which you could watch via live stream video and follow on twitter.In an effort to continue providing the higher ed community with opportunities to engage with prospective students, we’re introducing a [...]

Housekeeping

by Zone 5

Does your code clean up after itself? Because it should.One of our clients has a set of scripts that run updates every night. Those scripts log everything they do, and those log files are store on the file system. No big deal, really. Except that after weeks, months, years, there will be thousands of log [...]

Colleen’s Intro… the Mobile Health Competition

by Zone 5

Hi there Zone 5 readers. I’m Colleen and I’m the new Web and Social Media Project Manager ’round these parts. Instead of telling you about myself, I thought I’d show you what I’m about by sharing some details about a special enterprise I’m involved with – the Mobile Health Competition.I decided to enter this contest [...]

Things will go wrong.

by Zone 5

They will, and you have to deal with it. You can spend months designing the perfect system. You can do everything you can think of to make it foolproof. Something will go wrong. Something will break. At that point, the important thing becomes determining what happened and why and how can we fix it?Obviously the [...]

Our 101st (and 102nd) Drupal Update

by Zone 5

As you may know, our website is built with Drupal. When I took over responsibility for maintaining the modules in late 2009, I began keeping track of what modules I was updating and what the priority was. This morning I rolled out our 101st module update (Nodewords). It was quickly followed by our 102nd module [...]

Bacon

by Zone 5

Holiday brunch at Zone 5. Eggs, pancakes, fruit and muffins. Oh, and LOTS of bacon.Happy holidays!

jQuery Mobile

by Zone 5

A few weeks ago, jQuery Mobile hit 1.0. jQuery Mobile is a framework for building mobile web sites and applications regardless of device or platform. It uses the popular jQuery library so developers can jump right in and hit the ground running. There are a lot of things I like about jQuery Mobile, so I [...]

Why you should keep your CMS up to date

by Zone 5

The short answer is: because.But why? I don’t understand any of this computer stuff and it costs money to have someone do it for me.You shouldn’t dismiss your website like that. Your car needs maintenance. Your house needs maintenance. Your website is an important part of your business. For many people, your website is the [...]

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