Pemaquid Communications

Last weekend marked a milestone for those of us involved in the online world here in Maine. Joe Michaud, who had led MaineToday.com for the last dozen years, stepped down at the end of April, and many MaineToday “alumni” were on hand at Ri Ra last Friday to wish Joe well (Ellen Kanner, an old co-worker who now is a Web designer at Dartmouth, even came down from Hanover).

Folks who spent time working under Joe’s leadership have gone on to form successful, influential Web businesses in the area: Franklin McMahon (former MaineToday.com Creative Services Manager) now has a well-known photography and podcasting company; Justin Davis now heads Portland Web Works, a Pemaquid competitor whose Clients include the Maine Office of Tourism; and (because I like to enumerate things like this in groups of three) I’ll throw myself in there as well.

Way back in the mid ’90’s, when we barely knew what a “browser” was, Joe and a small team at the Portland Press Herald created a skunkworks to try to figure out this “Internet thing”. What developed was a series of Web sites that coalesced to form MaineToday.com. Under Joe’s leadership, MaineToday won many awards, often against larger competitors, and became known as a standard-setting creative force in the mostly bland world of online newspaper publishing.

We were always testing boundaries. I remember covering the 2000 election from the studios of our television partner, WMTW. My job was to post up-to-the-minute blurbs to the MaineToday site about the local, regional and national returns coming in that night. It was pretty radical for a newspaper to have someone publishing on the spot with very little editorial oversight. We didn’t call it blogging back then, but that’s exactly what we were doing.

Now Joe is hanging out a shingle as a consultant to said newspaper industry - and they really need to hear from someone like him. Newspaper ad revenue continues to erode, and those dollars are not migrating to publishers’ digital facsimiles of the printed word. Newspapers’ core revenue centers have continued to lose out to online competitors like Craig’s List (want ads), Cars.com (automotive ads) and Zillow (real estate ads).

My take is that it won’t be long before the creative destruction precipitated by the Internet drives newspapers to the same fate as encyclopedia salesmen. However, if there’s anyone who can help smart publishers figure out how to best take advantage of their remaining assets - strong brands, relatively large audiences and strong advertiser relationships - it’s Joe Michaud.

Before launching a new site, it’s always a good idea to run a check on its accessibility to folks with visual or other physical disabilities.

One of our favorite tools for checking Web site accessibility is no longer available. The WebXact service from Watchfire had a very comprehensive free assessment tool that not only checked accessibility but also other important components of the Web page to make sure it was well-formed. Alas! IBM, which owns Watchfire, decided in February that the tool would no longer be offered for free - it now costs a very steep $1,580 for a 12-month license.

Not surprisingly, according to one metric I use, the site’s traffic plummeted in March to half of its previous levels. I expect April’s traffic numbers will be down even further. Perhaps a better idea would have been for IBM to continue offering WebXact for free while posting ads for content relevant to those using the service.

No matter. Other excellent free tools are available. Here are a few we use at Pemaquid:

• Cynthia Says Portal (contentquality.com) - from HiSoftware, a company that develops accessible software. Just enter the URL of a page in question on your site, and the service will run a report to show how it measures up against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 guidelines. The report is thorough and runs very fast. It’s become the spot-checker-of-choice for many top-flight Web design firms.
• WAVE - runs a similar report when you enter the URL of a page. Offers a visual view of the page as well as some other features, including a text-only view. Not as comprehensive as Cynthia Says. Here’s a report on Pemaquid’s home page

No accessibility tool is perfect, but these two can help you avoid making obvious mistakes.

Finally, I should add Web designers shouldn’t rely on any tool to tell them whether their work is accessible. You need to do your homework. Required reading: the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines for accessible Web design.

About a year ago I had a mid-life crisis. I pulled out my bass guitar, which for years had been gathering dust under the bed in the spare room, and looked to join a blues band. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far.

I play bass and sing backing vocals (badly) in Bluezberry Jam, a great group of folks here in Portland, Maine. My band mates are: Myra Robinson (vocals, percussion), Dave Collins (vocals, guitars), Rudy Gabrielson (keyboards, harmonica, percussion, electric dulcimer, vocals) and Rick Cormier (percussion).

They are all more musically gifted than I am, but I make it up by leading one of the most talented Web design studios in Maine.

In my spare time I recently rocked out an updated site for the band. It uses the Pemaquid Content Manager for self-publishing content. I had some fun w/creative copywriting and design, and it’s got a lot of Pemaquid’s typical interactive goodies, including accessible sliders and photo galleries.

We hope you find it musically delicious! Hope to see you at a gig soon…

Wordpress 2.5 was released about a week ago. It sports an administrative interface that was redesigned by Happy Cog. I’ve kicked the tires on it and it’s a lean, clean machine. You may want to upgrade.

Seems like everybody is Twittering these days (or at least everyone in the wonderful world of Web).

For the uninitiated (unindoctrinatred?) Twitter is a service that let’s you tell your buds where you are and what you’re doing in up-to-the-minute detail (emphasis on “minute” as in ‘my-NOOT’). You can post to your Twitter via a cellphone text message and your pals subscribe to be notified when you “twitter” (verb). You can “follow” the tweets of others, having the site alert you by cellphone when friends update their accounts.

It’s this “text-message-broadcasting” that makes Twitter unique.

I’d always been of the opinion that all this twittering is not especially useful, and that instead of making life easier it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. I recently had the perfect opportunity to test that assumption: the 2008 SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I knew some folks who were going to attend and Twitter seemed like the perfect way to stay in immediate contact as we fanned out across the cavernous conference facilities.

At that it worked reasonably well. “Panel in Ballroom A rocks! - u should b here” or “I’m coming down from the second floor - meet me at the 4th Street entrance and we’ll go to lunch” were typical posts. On the other hand, I concluded that I could have easily survived - as I have for many years - without the tweeting.

There’s a certain tyranny about using Twitter. Ostensibly, one of the biggest reasons to use Twitter is to let your pals know where you are or what you’re thinking in up-to-the-minute fashion. So you can easily fall into a post-early-post-often-vortex in order to keep friends informed (otherwise, after all, they might think you’re dead, and come to look for you at your last-twittered location).

Many technological tools are like this. There’s a tantalizing enticement to do something you’ve never been able to do before (”Cool, I can send a single text message to a Web site and it can alert all my friends? Dude!”). We spend a lot of time in front of our computers… because we can (I’m guilty as charged). We use devices that save us time - but if we then fill up that newly-found free time with activities that aren’t very meaningful, our quality of life goes down, not up.

There’s a usability message here: before adopting a new technological device or app we should take a serious look at whether these tools truly help make our lives easier and better - or merely different.

Would you ever call an apparel retailer like L.L. Bean and ask for a pizza? Even if you did, would you expect them to assist you? Well, that’s just what a customer service rep at Zappos.com did, according to company CEO Tony Hsieh, who led a discussion on Top Ten Lessons Learned in e-commerce at SXSW Interactive.

Hsieh recounted the time when (at a different) conference, someone couldn’t get a late night pizza from room service, he jokingly suggested they ring his call center. Zappos, he said, focuses its branding on providing superlative customer service. The rep came through, providing the names of 5 pizza joints in the vicinity of the hotel.

Zappos sells apparel (primarily shoes) but Hsieh said that delivering exceptionally great customer service is key to their branding strategy - and their success. He said it may be more expensive to do that - Zappos provides free shipping and staffs its call center so that the average hold time is only 15 seconds - but its viewed as an investment, not an expense.

Hsieh says that important because when it comes to e-commerce, customer loyalty, repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals are very important to developing a successful business.

Here’s Hsieh’s Top Ten Lessons Learned in e-commerce:

1. e-commerce is built on repeat customers
2. word-of-mouth really works online
3. don’t compete on price
4. make sure Web site inventory is 10% accurate
5. centrally locate your distribution
6. customer service is an investment, not an expense
7. start small, stay focused
8. don’t be secretive; don’t worry about competitors
9. actively manage your company culture
10. be wary of so-called “experts”

Here’s a link to Hsieh’s presentation.

Here I am at SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas. If they nuked this town right now, they’d eliminate the talent behind the world’s most popular and innovative sites and set back Web development ten years - as well as perhaps 80% of the world’s MacBook Pro users.

I’m glad to be here for the second year in a row. I’m not so glad my bags are not…

The Big Easy, located at 55 Market Street in the heart of Old Port, is Portland’s premier music venue. Club owner Ken Bell was looking for a hip new look that would give folks a great way to easily look up upcoming shows. More importantly, he wanted a way to easily self-publish photos, calendar listings and links.

So, we rocked until our fingers bled onto our mouses and created a new look that we hope makes you want to head downtown. Ken says feedback has been very complimentary so far - thanks everybody!

The site uses the Pemaquid Content Manager for self-publishing of content. Ken & Co. will also be using Pemaquid’s email service for enewsletters.

Your Rockstar Design Team are:

Walt Craven - Graphic Design, guitars (Walt is also the lead vocalist for local band Lost on Liftoff)

The Elusive Dr. Jecker (that’s Dr. Jennifer Ecker, Pixel Surgeon) - Web design, lead guitars, keyboard, harmonica, ukelele

Rob Landry - (yours truly) Interaction Design, Programming, bass, drums, vocals (yes, bass & drums at the same time)

Rock on!

Gettin’ on a Big Ol’ Jet Airliner later today to head to the biggest, baddest scrum of Web-slinging early-adopters the world has ever seen.

Yep, SXSW Interactive ‘08.

Two years ago, there was blogging. Last year, online video. This year it’s… (you guessed it)… All Things Social.

I’ll be reporting live.

Wow, that didn’t take long! A few days after we posted a message about how only certain folks could post their thoughts - or job postings - on MaineBusiness.com, the MaineToday.com property has retooled and opened things up so that anyone can set up their blogging shop.

Do we already wield that much clout in this town?!?

Nah, the changes were planned. We talked to Carl Natale, MaineBusiness’ Chief Information Innovator (he says he’s not an “editor” or “content developer”) last week. Anyway, it’s nice to see that we can post our own job openings on the site if we like.

Yep, we set up a MaineBusiness blog. Right now I’m looking for a catchy name. Comment if you have any ideas.

The other day I surfed over to the blog on Internet marketing written by Rich Brooks, President of Flyte New Media, and bumped into this job posting.

Interesting read - if you’re a job-seeker, that is. The rest of the business community would find it hard to glean anything useful.

It didn’t take long to find another job posting. During the same week.

Huh? I thought this was supposed to be about Internet marketing.

Funny, I’ve never read Bill Nemitz’ column in the Press Herald and found that he was on the lookout for copywriters. A column like that would never make the light of day.

Things are different at MaineBusiness.com, a title run by MaineToday.com and Blethen Maine Newspapers, according to Carl Natale, the editorial staffer who manages the site’s bloggers. I’ve spoken to Carl and he said he found nothing inappropriate with the post.

I beg to disagree. Shameless self-promotion that doesn’t add value to a site’s core readership should be out of bounds.

I was Carl’s predecessor at MaineBusiness.com, and when I ran the show, I was careful to instruct our columnists (this was back before anyone was a “blogger”) not to use their space to directly promote their business.

MaineBusiness.com’s stock in trade is its credibility. Without it, it’s just another Blogger.com (and I’d hate to see that happen).

Speaking of Blogger.com, Carl says that by the end of the month MaineBusiness.com will be rolling out a new set of blogging tools that will allow anyone to hang a shingle and roll their own blog on the site. If anyone can set up a blog about anything, that’s one way to diffuse the issue. We’ll look forward to that.

Cardiovascular Consultants of Maine provides state of the art heart care to patients throughout the region. Based in Scarborough and with facilities in Augusta, Waterville, Sanford and Farmington, their goal is to be known as the preeminent full-service cardiology group serving Northern New England.

They approached Pemaquid recently with a story that’s not uncommon: a staff member had set up their site several years ago, but things had evolved to the point where it was difficult to manage the information quickly and in an organized fashion.

Problem solved. Pemaquid created a design that, among other things, features an online resource library on heart health, heart disease prevention and the meaning of cardiovascular terms (think “Cardiomyopathy”, “Coumadin” or “ACE inhibitors”) that are important to people undergoing cardiac care.

Pemaquid provides ongoing content updates for CCM, as well as Web hosting services, and as with all our Clients, we focus on speed as well as design execution. April Donovan, Cardiovascular Consultants’ CEO, says we’re hitting our marks:

I find Rob Landry and his staff to be responsive, professional and reliable. They listen to our needs and offer innovative solutions through great design and quick delivery.

It’s been a pleasure working with April, Elise Plummer, Samantha Smith and all at Cardiovascular Consultants of Maine, and we look forward to working with them for a long time to come!

Firefox fans will be interested to know that version three of their favorite surfboard for the Web just went Beta yesterday. However, unless your inner geek can’t resist, you might want to hold of on downloading it for a bit. V3 lacks a number of important plug-ins, and it sometimes doesn’t render sites as it should (that’s why there’s a beta period, right?).

The word on the street is that Firefox 3 has solved most issues related to memory leaks and security - already very good - is new and improved.

Firefox is now used by roughly 20% of Internet users.

Firefox 3 download page & release notes »

Wednesday I was the guest lecturer at an e-business class at the University of Southern Maine. The students will be working with us on Extreme Makeover - Web Site Edition.

I’m happy to report that no fruit was thrown, and no snores were heard.

In fact I heard a lot of great questions (”Are there any types of projects you wouldn’t take on?” Answer: yes, but not many. That’s for another post.)

One question was inevitable, I suppose: “How do you make money building Web sites in Portland, Maine?” (Remember, this is a business class.)

After being in the Web design business for more than five years, here’s my answer. It might sound corny or trite, but it’s worked for me.

Identify a problem and then solve it. Over and over. Better and better. I started as a mild-mannered (OK, maybe not so much) HTML coder, then one day a Client asked whether I could help them create a content management system. I realized that interactive programming and databases were involved, so I developed the skills to meet that need. Over time Pemaquid has developed Web hosting, e-commerce and search engine marketing services to meet other needs we’re asked about all the time.

Focus on building relationships. Take good care of people, treat them the way you want to be treated and they will take care of you and they will come back to you again and again (See? I told you it was going to sound trite). A significant percentage of our new work comes to us through existing Clients. When someone says to a business contact “You should work with XYZ Web design”, giving you that third-party endorsement, it’s much more powerful and persuasive than just about any other sales pitch you can whip up.

Do those two things, be creative and always on the lookout for new trends in your industry, and the money (knocking hard on wood here) will usually take care of itself.

Reading through the tea leaves here is not that tough. Microsoft is offering a 60% premium over Yahoo’s recent stock price b/c it realizes that apps (email, spreadsheets, document-creation, etc.) is migrating from the desktop to a new home on the ‘Net.

Case in point: I work w/several young guns who:

• Use Google Talk for IM
• Use Google spreadsheets
• Use Gmail

They think “Why should I fork over my hard-earned moola for MS Office when I can get it online for free?”

Then there’s Google AdWords, Google Analytics; oh, and Google also has this really cool search engine thingy.

Google here, Google there, Google, Google everywhere…

It’s definitely a threat to Microsoft’s facetime w/computer users.

What does a combined Microshoo mean for business marketing online? Probably a new ad network, combined MSN-Yahoo! search engine. Something that looks a lot like… Google.

Stay tuned…

I surfed over to a certain Maine Web site the other day and found that it had been redesigned. Here is the site navigational structure:

Can anyone tell me with 100% certainty what those items represent?

Therein lies the problem. You can’t tell what you’re going to get when you click (you can’t even tell that you can click). The only hint that this is the site navigation is that it is positioned in the spot where, if you’ve surfed for any length of time, you know that navigation is usually found.

Here’s the site, btw, if you’d now like to see that nav positioned within the overall layout.

(I don’t mean to pick on Downeast. They’re a great company and their Web site is far better than the previous version. I’m just using their site to show how you can improve the user experience on sites you design.)

Navigation is best as text. Text that is unambiguous. “About” is more effective than “Who We Are“.

Lo and behold, when you mouseover the nav on this site in question, you see a… word.

There are two big reasons why you should use text in you site navigation.

Usability. There’s an excellent book on Web design by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think. In it, Krug points out usability studies show that people usually don’t read Web sites - until they’ve found that article they were searching for - they scan them. Navigational text that is simple and clear supports this scanning activity. With graphics, you have to stop and think (”hmmm… what could a camera mean?…”) This is why icons, unless they are universally understood, are also poor choices for navigational labels on Web sites.

Accessibility. In the example above, if you were visually impaired and came upon this site, there would be no way for you to understand that the images represented the site navigation. It would be much better to place navigational items towards the top of your HTML as a list of text links and to then use CSS to style the list to match your overall design concept.

Web site designs like the one in question point to a larger issue in Web design, which I call The Tyranny of Graphic Design. That’s a topic for another day, but briefly, Web design is not graphic design. It’s interaction design (of which graphic design is certainly a part). In creating Web sites, designers should take care that the graphical design concepts they produce make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on a site, not harder.

Don’t make me think…

Joe Michaud, president of MaineToday.com, is announcing that he is leaving April 30 to start his own consulting business. Joe says he’ll be focusing on helping newspaper companies change their strategies and is convinced newspaper companies can survive.

If anyone can do it, it’s Joe Michaud, but I am very skeptical.

Back in the day, newspapers were the first true “information companies”. People picked up the Sunday paper for all sorts of reasons: news, sports, classifieds, community calendar, auto ads, coupons - and so on. The newspaper worked b/c it combined all that information in a neat package that was easy to deliver and had something for everyone.

Now, there’s a new place to go to get all the information you need - your computer, connected to the Internet.

Want to know who won Best Actor in 1943? Google it.

Want to know about an obscure topic like domain tasting? Ask Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia, does anyone still buy encyclopedias anymore? Encyclopedias, like newspapers, provided a wealth of information. Alas, for Britannica salesmen, that information is now easily available online.

There’s an article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal on How We Get News (in the future). In it, there’s this line:

…in the next decade we won’t use newspapers or television news programs to decide what stories we see each day…

One big key for newspapers going forward is going to be relevance. I know one person who recently dropped his subscription to the Portland Press Herald b/c on his Sunday paper, above the fold, were two headlines - one on Paris Hilton’s release from prison, the other on the upcoming final episode of the Sopranos (this is not a joke).

Newspapers will have to do a much better job understanding what is relevant to their best customers. To make matters worse for them, the Internet is making it easier for small teams to disseminate high quality information that meets or exceeds what can be provided by the local newspaper team. Probably the worst news of all for publishers is that as people spend more time online, advertisers are finding a more cost-effective way to market their brands than through ads in the local paper.

I worked for Joe Michaud at MaineToday.com a few years ago. It was a great experience all the way around. Joe was an innovator, and there were lots of creative people on staff (and then there was me . The main reason I didn’t stick around is b/c I was pessimistic about the long-term prospects for newspapers. I figured they might be gone before Joe retired and I’d have a shot at a promotion.

If anyone can help newspapers succeed in the 21st century, it’s Joe Michaud, and I wish him well. But because of the way people get information these days, I think it’s doubtful the newspaper as we know it will survive. In the near future, I predict publications using content from professional journalists will look quite different than they do today, will cater to narrower niche markets, and will in all likelihood not enjoy the regional monopoly of the local newspaper companies of today.

We’ve always had this crazy idea - what if we remade someone’s e-commerce Web site from the ground up, the way they remodel those houses on that TV show?

Well, we put out the word and the response was truly overwhelming - we received requests from roughly 50 Maine businesses who were looking for a makeover. We want to thank them all for their interest. We feel lucky to have had so many worthy candidates to choose from!

We’ve made a selection, and we expect to launch the site in late spring. We’ll be receiving input from students of an e-commerce and marketing class at the University of Southern Maine.

In selecting our Makeover candidate, our first stop was the existing Web site. Then we spoke with some of the business owners to get a sense of their online sales goals. Other things we considered in finding the best fit:

Variety of products. Some candidates sell only one product, and while it’s great to do one thing well, we were looking for a Maine business with several different products in a number of different categories.

Well-defined brand. With our Extreme Makeover, we wanted to focus squarely on the Web site redesign; we didn’t want to spend a lot of time remaking a small business’ image. The brand had to be clearly defined - our job will be to execute the brand strategy through the Web site design.

Existing e-commerce system. Some businesses we considered were locked into an existing e-commerce framework that would have been expensive or time-consuming to rework. The ideal candidate would have more flexibility in terms of the e-commerce systems we wanted to deploy.

We want to tip our cap to the Maine Products Marketing Program for helping put out the word to the hundreds of small Maine businesses who are members of their program.

So who’s the lucky winner of Extreme Makeover? Sorry to keep you in suspense, but we’re going to keep that under wraps for now. Stay tuned to this space for more details as the project unfolds.

As if we needed more evidence that going anywhere near Network Solutions’ Web site is a very, very bad idea (notice I’m not linking you to them) , word is spreading across the ‘Net that NetSol is using a highly questionable tactic to try to boost its flagging sales of domain name registrations.

Here’s what happens: if you do a whois search for “anyolddomainname.com” on the NetSol site, if it’s available, within seconds the registrar will reserve the name itself, meaning that if you search for a name, then decide you want to buy it later on from another registrar offering a better price (which all of them do) you’re out of luck.

Registering a domain name through Network Solutions has never been a good deal. They charge $35/year. GoDaddy, the market leader, charges about $8/year. NetSol has always relied upon its name recognition to attract the uninitiated to its ridiculously expensive service.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re looking to find out if that cool domain name you just thought up is available for registration:

1. Friends DO NOT let friends use Network Solutions to register a domain name. NetSol costs 400% more than most other registrars, and they make it very difficult to transfer your name to another (i.e. cheaper) registrar at a later date.
2. DO use a a basic service like Whois.sc (Domain Tools)
3. Do not simply type the domain into your favorite browser to determine whether a name is available. A “Server not found” message simply tells you the domain hasn’t been set up to serve Web pages. It’s possible the name may be owned, but hasn’t been set up.
4. While no one has reported that other registrars, like GoDaddy or Register.com, have copied NetSol’s tactics, remember that there’s no guarantee they won’t in the future. I kinda doubt GoDaddy will resort to this, because they’ve got a good thing going with their name registration business. Register.com? It could happen.
5. If you were unlucky enough to search for a name on NetSol, only to have them reserve the name before you could buy it @ GoDaddy, take heart - Network Solutions isn’t actually buying the name, they are setting it aside for a 5-day grace period under a byzantine practice called domain tasting. Simply wait the five days, then surf on over to GoDaddy, or other reasonably priced registrars, and pick up the name after NetSol releases it. Problem is, you have to hope that no one else decides to buy it from NetSol in the meantime which, unfortunately, is possible.

What does the developer community think of NetSol’s latest breath taking display of customer care? You guessed it. People are using NetSol’s name registration system against them to make a statement. As of this writing, recently-searched domain names included www.networksolutionsislame.com. (And that’s one of the milder ones.)

Why don’t they simply lower their prices to be more competitive, you say? That is indeed a Great Mystery.

More information:

Network Solutions Stands by Name Policy

Domain Registrar Network Solutions Front Running On Whois Searches

Network Solutions Registers Evey Domain Name Checked

Network Solutions Responds to Front Running Accusations

It’s that time of year again, when people take a look back at what they’ve done and take a look ahead. Some, including Yours Truly, still even make New Year’s Resolutions.

Seth Godin has a great post on his blog today that fits right in with that theme. He says people should think about what they’re doing right now and ask themselves if they will be proud of themselves 15 years hence. Do we think these are crazy days? Godin says that’s nothing new:

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

If times are going to be crazy no matter how you slice it, says Godin, Why Not Be Great?

Sounds like a good Resolution to me.

Leo Burnett, the great ad man, had the same idea, which he put this way:

When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get them, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.

And Donald Trump said:

As long as you’re going to think anyway, think big.

To paraphrase The Donald, if you, like me, are going to build Web sites anyway, think big. Stretch a little bit this year:

• If you’re still coding layouts w/table structures, learn some CSS (Your Clients will thank you because their sites will be easier to update and maintain)
• If you’re still creating design concepts that depend on embedding a lot of images into each Web page, again, learn some CSS (Clients will appreciate that their pages are dramatically smaller, load more quickly and use much less bandwidth - bandwidth costs money)
• If you’re not yet writing valid code based on Web Standards, start (Clients will thank you when it becomes easier to maintain the look and feel of their sites across different browsers and operating systems
• If you haven’t learned about Web site accessibility, start reading up on it, and apply to your sites (your Clients, and their Web site visitors with visual and physical disabilities, will thank you for being mindful of their special needs)
• If you think it’s more important to bring people to your site - (search engine marketing) - than it is to keep them there - (Web site design and usability) - please think again (if you don’t, your Clients’ competitors will thank you for sending customers their way as they flee a hard-to-use site)

Here’s wishing you a happy, productive - and Great! - New Year!