Welcome to the Zikra Starter: a fast foundation

Welcome to the Zikra Astro starter. This is the reusable foundation that every Zikra agency site is forked from, and this post is both an introduction and a working example of a correctly authored article. If you are reading it on a freshly cloned site, everything you see here — the layout, the SEO tags, the RSS feed, the tag pages — is already wired up and waiting for your content.

The goal of the starter is simple: give a new project a production-grade baseline on day one, so the team spends its time on the site’s actual message instead of re-solving problems that every site has already solved. Fast pages, clean markup, sensible defaults, and no surprises when it ships to the edge.

What comes in the box

The starter ships with the pieces a modern marketing site needs, already configured and verified:

• Astro 7 rendering static pages to Cloudflare’s edge, so visitors get HTML the instant they arrive rather than waiting on a client-side framework.
• A blog content collection with a typed frontmatter schema. Titles, descriptions, dates, and tags are validated at build time, so a malformed post fails the build instead of quietly shipping broken.
• SEO out of the box: per-page titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter cards, LocalBusiness and Article structured data, a sitemap, an RSS feed, and an llms.txt file for AI answer engines.
• A lead pipeline built around a validated form, Turnstile spam protection, and durable storage — so a submission is never silently lost.

Each of these is a place where a hand-rolled site tends to cut corners. Bundling them into the foundation means every forked site inherits the good version.

Authoring your first post

Adding a post is deliberately boring, which is the point. Create an .mdx file in src/content/blog/, fill in the frontmatter, and write your body starting at an H2 — the H1 is rendered from the post title by the layout, so you never write it yourself. Keep the description between 150 and 160 characters; it becomes the meta description and the card summary on the blog index.

Tags are lowercase and become their own archive pages automatically. Give a post a couple of focused tags and it will appear on each matching tag page with no extra work. When a post is still in progress, set draft: true and it disappears from listings, the sitemap, and the RSS feed in production while staying visible in local development.

A few conventions worth internalizing early:

1. Write the description for a human skimming search results, not for a keyword crawler. It is the first sentence a reader sees.
2. Link internally where it helps. Sending readers to related posts or to the contact page keeps them on the site and helps search engines understand how pages relate.
3. Prefer real headings over bold text. Headings give the page structure that both assistive technology and search engines rely on.

Where to go next

From here, open src/config.ts and set the site name, URL, and description — those values flow into every SEO tag and structured-data block on the site. Then replace these two sample posts with your own, wire up the contact form, and you have a launchable site.

If you want the full authoring reference, the second sample post walks through how we build fast, SEO-friendly sites on this exact foundation. Between the two, you have a complete picture of how a Zikra site goes from clone to launch — and a template you can copy for every article after this one.