Pemaquid Communications

Just a few short days ago Pemaquid launched a brand new Web site for the Maine Maritime Museum. The museum, located in Bath, Maine, is an extraordinary and fascinating tribute to Maine’s seafaring, shipbuilding heritage.

Maine Maritime has the largest collection of shipbuilding tools in the world, and has more than 20,000 items in its collection. It’s the only place in the world where you can tour a working U.S. naval shipyard, at the nearby Bath Iron Works. The world’s largest wooden ship, the six-masted schooner Wyoming, was built on what is now the museum grounds.

The Challenge

Maine Maritime asked Pemaquid to redesign its Web site because its old site was not doing a good job telling these stories and conveying the unique visitor experience one gets when touring the Museum’s exhibits and grounds (you can see the old site here). It was hard for people to find things, such as upcoming events and the exhibit curator’s posts, called Notes from the Orlop, and the online store was confusing and difficult to use.

It was so difficult for staff to use the site’s content management system that the site was difficult to use and very limiting as to what information the staff could control. A Flash-based slideshow on the home page didn’t work on iPhones and iPads, and the layout didn’t include linkages to social media points-of-presence.

We set to work to correct these problems.

The Solution

First, we wanted to create a look with visual impact. To connect with the museum’s visitor experience, we used an image of an old map from the museum archives as the background for the site “canvas”. We played off the angle of the nautical flag in the logo in several places. And we selected serif fonts for the page titles and navigation links that had the same character as that we’d seen in some of the exhibits.

Our next goal was to make sure people could find what they were looking for as well as create opportunities for them to bump into enticing features they may not have considered. While the old site had navigational links called “What To Do” and “Things To See”, items you might expect to find on a tourism site, we chose names like “Events”, Exhibits”, “Collection” and “Visit” to answer questions museum-goers would have. And unlike the old site, we made sure the navigation is precisely consistent on every single page.

Finally, for content management, we installed our Curator system, customized to Maine Maritime’s unique needs. The Curator is a collection of modules based on the Open Source Django platform. The Curator modules we installed for Maine Maritime include: Events, Exhibitions, Resources, Testimonials, Shop (for the e-store) and Pages. The modules allow museum staff to effortlessly update the site, add new pages and edit every section of the home page.

A site administrator can create other users and precisely control what parts of the site they can edit. For example, one user group can manage the e-store – updating products and checking on orders. Members of the curatorial staff can add exhibit information, while the folks in marketing and public relations can act as editors overseeing the entire content strategy.

The Curator content manager has led to an amazing transformation at Maine Maritime Museum. Staff members are using it all the time; some even find it fun to use. After a presentation in which staff gave it a test drive, a member of the curatorial staff, familiar with other more generic open source CMS’s, said, “This is better than WordPress!” (we love hearing things like that!).

The Strategy

We’re now working with the museum’s marketing communications department to fine-tune the site’s content strategy and use the Curator to post information that will encourage people to register for events, make donations, purchase items in the store and of course visit the museum itself.

We’ve seen immediate and incredibly (highly or very – incredibly seems a bit strong) positive results. In the first month since the new site launched, traffic has increased considerably: pageviews are up 52%, time-on-site is up more than 25% and pages-per-visit is up 25%.

Over the coming months we’ll continue to partner with Maine Maritime to develop a comprehensive online communications strategy to tie the museum’s Facebook page and Twitter feed with its enewsletters, blogs and events to engage members of the community, to spread the word about museum programs and exhibits and drive traffic to the site – and in the door.

As we Portlanders like to say, our town has more restaurants per capita than any city in the country except San Francisco. There is a corresponding density of that most enigmatic of Internet properties – the Really Bad Restaurant Web Site.

This was made painfully clear as I researched local eateries while preparing to entertain a guest from out of town. More often than not, I found myself served the standard fare – Flash intros (with the obligatory “skip intro” link and which don’t play on iPads or iPhones), graphics the size of an asteroid and which take more than 8 seconds to load, and menus buried so deeply I felt I had discovered buried treasure when they were finally found.

Why are restaurant Web sites so astonishingly awful?

After all, it’s 2011, not 1999. The rest of the Web has abandoned splash pages with videos that auto-play and menus encased on 40MB PDF files that must be downloaded to be read. Why do restaurants – even upscale eateries that should have the means to afford quality interaction design – seemingly exist on a Web That Time Forgot?

In a recent article on Slate, Farhad Manjoo attempts to answer the question. His conclusion: most sites are run by chefs in their 50′s who don’t spend much time in front of a computer. They are often abetted in their ignorance by Web designers who are only too glad to feed their desires for sound beds and Flash-y-ness.

But other industries have site owners that don’t get much screentime and yet long ago abandoned the worst design practices. There’s one other essential reason why restaurant sites haven’t evolved.

It has to do with usability.

Restaurants conduct no actual business on their Web sites. You can buy shirts, pants or even cars online, but to get Grilled Duck Steak with Gnocchi you still have to head over to someone’s dining room.

Because restaurant Web sites don’t (directly) ring the cash registers, most haven’t awakened to the need to make their sites easy to use. That’s a big mistake, because about a third of reservations are made during times when a restaurant is closed. Mobile traffic is growing, so making sure your site downloads information to those devices easily is critical to capturing an ever-growing percentage of site traffic.

To have a successful Web site, restaurant owners should do the following:

Make menus easy to access – Have a page in your navigation labeled “menu”, and make it a Web page, not a PDF or a graphic. Feature specials on the home page. Show prices.

Design for mobile – A simple, easy to download user interface for mobile will help capture people who are looking for a meal on the spur of the moment.

Make contact information easy to find – have your Web designer create a Google map showing the restaurant location, and feature your phone number and address prominently

Make use of social media – you *are* using Facebook and Twitter to promote your restaurant, aren’t you?

Eliminate the Flash – Flash can’t be read by the diner who’s kicking back with her iPad. Flash content can’t be accessed by search engines. Get rid of the splash pages; remember that there’s a reason why every one of them has a “skip intro” link. Save the pizzazz for the dining room.

Picking a favorite Client is a little like choosing a favorite offspring – you love them all in their own special way. But annie|catherine design stationery is certainly one of the Clients I like the most. The business run by Annie Darling and Catherine Breer has always had a warm, playful friendly vibe and an amazing creativity that is inspiring. Their work is truly unique; Annie has a knack for saying just the right thing and then translating that visually. Catherine’s art captures life along the Down East coast in a way that I’m sure Gauguin would approve.

I’ve helped them create two Web sites over the years, most recently the current version, which launched earlier this year. Annie, naturally, created the design concept, since she’s really the only person who possibly could have done it justice. Throughout the process I’ve come to understand and appreciate Annie’s attention to detail. She wanted to be very precise with fonts, layout and proportion. I also admire her patience: the annie|catherine site is one of the first in which we installed a new kind of e-commerce system, and while we’re pretty good at it now, there was a bit of a learning curve at the time. Annie handled the bumps and bruises with more grace than I would have if the shoe had been on the other foot. If she could bottle that stuff up and sell it, I’m sure she would make a mint.

I’m proud of the site we’ve built together, and I’ve learned a lot about the creative process and the fine art of working together (I still have a lot to learn). I’m sure it would still be a Very Good Site without the work of Annie Darling. But I’m not at all sure that it would be a Best of the Web award winner.

Two sites designed by Pemaquid have been named Best of the Web award winners for 2011 by the Technology Association of Maine (techmaine.com). Awards were presented at the TechMaine Gala Thursday, June 23. The winning sites are:

PortlandMusicFoundation.org – Best Non-Profit Site.

annie|catherine.com – Best e-commerce Site.

Another Pemaquid site, MaineLobsterFestival.com, was a finalist for Best Arts & Entertainment site.

Two out of three ain’t bad! All three sites use the Django open source framework for content management and e-commerce. More details about the sites were posted earlier this month.

Thanks to our Clients for giving us the opportunity to show what we can do!

Well, you know what they say – Don’t Believe The Hype. Lately, there’s been a lot of hype regarding the word “mobile”.

Because phones have gotten so smart in the last few years, everyone is asking about mobile. “How can I need to take advantage of mobile?” small business owners, or those who run large membership organizations (at the urging of their members, no doubt), will ask. “I need a mobile version of my Web site” they’ll say, worried that they will get left behind and that somehow their site won’t get found.

Some Web design shops have been only too glad to tell people what they want to hear. “We do mobile”, they’ll shout. “Relax”, they say, “we’re experts”.

The small business owner in particular should be highly skeptical about such claims, however. Here’s why.

Mobile is easy

Creating a “mobile Web site” is a piece of cake. How do you do it? You… build a Web site, using HTML and CSS. Sound familiar? It should; that’s the way Web sites have been built for the last 15 years. If you use proper semantic code, and apply Web Standards when building your standard Web site, your site should perform just fine on mobile devices (they don’t call them “smart phones” for nothing).

If you want to “mobify” your Web site (create a simpler, text-only version of your site that’s optimized for not-so-smart phones) this is easily done with any one of a dozen conversion tools that any self-respecting Web development team can apply to your site faster than you can say “blackberry”.

Let me say that again: any self-respecting Web development team.

So much for so-called “expertise”.

When most Web shops say “we do mobile” this is, in reality, what they mean. Small potatoes. Chump change.

Mobile apps are hard

Of course, when most small business owners say “Can you do mobile” usually they’re really wondering “can you build an iPhone app for my business?” Most small Web development shops cannot, nor can small businesses afford bona fide app development.

iPhone app development (most of which is something called “native app” development) is highly specialized and sophisticated. it requires a special software development kit and rigorous testing needs to be done to ensure that the app can send, receive and store data properly. Unlike a Web site, which simply makes information available, an app must be primed for performance, connectivity and specific use cases must be tested for usability. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the cost very easily runs into five figures and often six. Once you’re done with the development, an app still needs to go through Apple’s review process before it gets listed in the app store.

And when you’re through with that, you may want to create another version of your app for Android mobile devices. Lather, rinse and repeat the previous paragraph.

Does your small business have the budget for that? I didn’t think so. But don’t worry – your competitors don’t have that kind of budget either.

Most claims of mobile prowess by small Web development shops are not in line with the (often unrealistic) expectations of most small business owners, and they are (surprise!) taking advantage of that to generate business opportunities.

The bottom line is that mobile is all that, and it’s also nothing at all. As always, when it comes to technology, small business owners should apply a healthy dose of skepticism when they hear the mobile pitch.

Three sites designed and developed by Pemaquid Communications have been named finalist for the 2011 TechMaine.com Best of the Web awards. And the nominees are….

annie|catherine designer stationery – Best e-commerce Site. Launched on Valentine’s Day, the site run by Annie Darling and Catherine Breer features creative, colorful cards and calendars adorned with Catherine’s art work depicting Maine scenes. The site, powered by the Django Open Source content management framework and its Satchmo e-commerce package, allows them to more easily manage product listings, sale offerings, gift certificates and promotional codes.

Portland Music Foundation – Best Non-Profit Site. The Portland Music Foundation is dedicated to promoting the music scene in Portland and offers regular workshops to assist musicians with their marketing and professional development. To our knowledge it is nearly unique – it’s one of only two music foundations in the entire country, and their mission takes cues from its counterpart, the Austin Music Foundation (and we all know about the music scene in Austin, right?). One unique feature is a Venue Finder, a google map mashup that helps you find the clubs in Portland, Maine where various types of music can be found. The site runs a Django CMS customized by Pemaquid and includes the Satchmo e-commerce component.

Maine Lobster Festival – Best Arts & Entertainment Site. This site redesign was undertaken as part of a class project with students from Maine College of Art, partnered with mentors in a project called Extreme Makeover – Web Site Edition. The site exposed the students to the Web design process in real life situation, and the Client a great site for a fraction of the cost. The site runs on the Django open source framework and the site uses the Satchmo e-commerce package.

Winners will be announced June 23rd at the 2011 TechMaine Gala.

About ten years ago, just as I was starting my own company, there were several Web firms vying for the attention of anxious business owners who in many cases were looking for their very first site.

One shop in particular was a darling of the local business community. They had a glittering office space in a conspicuous location on Congress Street, a dozen employees and a bright, shiny Web site.

The company principal bedazzled members of the business community with polished presentations laden with of buzzwords like “New Economy” and “splash page”. Surely he must be endowed with special knowledge!

But as is so often the case, the beauty was only skin deep. When it came time for this Web shop’s sites to perform, they were about as effective as a supermodel trying to run a hundred dash in high heels: they quickly collapsed.

I recall one site in particular built by this firm that had a so-called online registration system built for an annual conference event held in Portland. I say so-called because some companies who registered groups of conference attendees online arrived to find that they only had one set of credentials.

This was all very embarrassing to the conference organizer who had been left holding the bag after they had paid their Web shop for a site that had failed to deliver.

That firm eventually fell from grace, but the in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. “Social media” and “we do mobile!” are phrases you hear today. Why? Because it’s what people want to hear, of course.

But talking the talk is one thing, doing the hard work is another. And when every agency in town is talking about how they are experts in [---insert random skill here---], by definition they can’t all be right.

And that’s fine with me. Because while they’re all racing to say they can make the flavor of the month, they aren’t doing a single thing to differentiate themselves and cultivate the savvy that will truly set them apart.

At Pemaquid, we focus on being first, being best, being no nonsense, being practical and focusing on a common sense approach to interaction design that works (and yes, we do social media and mobile – that’s the easy part). We don’t help our Clients to simply fish for a day. We teach them how to fish, while we manage the fisheries.

It’s working. 2011 is shaping up to be our best year ever.

And that other firm, the one that made the buggy registration system? They’re gone.

Last fall, after I gave a guest lecture to George Larou’s Web design class at the Maine College of Art, I told him about a crazy idea I had for a project. One in which Web design students could collaborate with experienced mentors to give an organization a new site while getting some real-life experience in how a Web site gets built.

Larou was excited, and graciously agreed to allow 4 willing students in his class to participate. The result was Extreme Makeover: Web Site Edition.

The students, Scott Lyle, Matt McGilvray, Meg Woods and Kelsey Raymond, teamed up with information architect Ellen Kanner, Web designer Suzy Massey and yours truly. The first task was to pick the subject of our makeover.

We finally settled upon a Pemaquid Client: the Maine Lobster Festival. All things considered, they weren’t in desperate need of a redesign, but it had been five years since the site had gotten a facelift. More importantly, because they already had an established relationship it was easier to approach them with our unconventional plan. Holly Sherburne and the rest of the Festival board enthusiastically agreed to be our guinea pigs.

For several weeks we met on Friday to plan our project. We reviewed and adjusted the site map and the students were tasked with creating their own looks based on a simple creative brief. We looked at similar festival events, including the Sundance Film Festival. We discussed the content strategy for the Web site, which needed to be simple so that it could be well maintained with minimal effort.

After a lot of experimentation and trying several approaches, former MECA student and graphic designer Walter Craven joined us in January and contributed the design concept that formed the basis for the look of the site. It was important to me that the look be really captivating, have the feel of a magazine, and look good on an iPad and other tablets. Walt’s look does that in spades.

Once we got the look nailed down, we started coding. We use four jQuery plug-ins on the site for various effects. Cycle is used to rotate the scenes from the festival on the home page. Accordion is used for the Main Events sliders on the home page. jCarousel is used to scroll through the Gallery thumbnails (also on the home page), and Fancybox is employed to display the large image overlays seen when you click on those thumbnails.

Since social media is all the rage, Meg added a Facebook Fan Page widget and a Twitter widget to most pages, along with ShareThis chicklets to the top of the right sidebar of back pages.

Kelsey helped produce all the sponsor graphics to spec and did quite a bit of the CSS, under my direction. We used opacity for the home page banner effect and used the @font-face technique to render the Chunk Five font from Walt’s comp, which we got from Font Squirrel. She also learned the joys of browser-testing and the art of adjusting her code to fix the look in every designer’s favorite browser, IE7 (nah, we didn’t worry about IE6 since it garners only about 1% of the traffic). She also ran the site through the W3C validator and found a few things we’ll be adjusting over the next week or so.

Content Management was the easy part. The site had already been set up on the Django Content Manager we use for most Client projects here at Pemaquid now, along with the Satchmo e-commerce package, which really gives you a lot of flexibility in setting up an online store. The Lobster Festival is selling their famous posters sets, and they’ll soon be able to add tickets for the live nationally recognized entertainers when those performances have been firmed up. Hats, T-shirts and other merchandise are on the way as well.

The one regret I have is that I wish we had been able to move through this project more quickly because two of our students, Scott and Matt, weren’t able to stay involved throughout the project due to other obligations. But overall I’m very happy with the way things turned out, as is the Client.

We’ve left the old site up for awhile at: http://old.mainelobsterfestival.com in case you’re curious to see what it looked like before this spring’s metamorphosis.

So that’s this edition of Extreme Makeover: Web Site Edition. Overall it went well, and I’d do it again with another group of students, because we can’t ever have enough good Web designers here in Portland, Maine.

Know of any good sites out there that need a makeover?

Well, Hello World! It’s good to see you again.

It’s been a heckuva long time since the last blog post. We’ve had plenty of work here at Pemaquid for the last several months and somehow blogging about it hasn’t ranked very high on the todo list.

I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on improving the financial efficiency of our operation, and that’s paid off so far. 2011 will be our best year ever. It’s a good time to be in Web.

We’ve launched sites for great Clients like annie|catherine designer stationery, MaineBiz Sunday, Portland Music Foundation and, launched just this week, the Maine Lobster Festival, and done work for dozens of others including Oakhurst Dairy. Social media is still all the rage and we’re helping Clients make sense of the cacophony of tweeting, facebooking and blogging.

I’m working with a great group of people now as well. Jordan Warren has left for bigger and better things in Beantown, but fortunately she’s been replaced by new Creative Services Coordinator Trish Altieri (who’s better, not bigger). Trish is just what the doctor ordered – she has experience running operations for an ad agency here in Maine, so she fit right in and is whipping things into shape. Kelsey Raymond, whom I met last fall while guest lecturing to her Web design class at the Maine College of Art, has gone from intern to humble apprentice and is developing into a fine interface producer. Walt Craven has pitched in to do the design work on several sites, including the aforementioned Portland Music Foundation and Maine Lobster Festival. Elliot Bradbury continues to work his Django wizardry and has been – thankfully! – very reliable. Suzy Massey has been displaying her black belt in CSS and HTML. And there are many more who have contributed (Bob, Rebecca, Doug – thumbs up!).

Coworking continues at Wycwah, where we’re currently sharing space with our friends from NewsSimply and Sarah Robbins of Yacht.com and of course, Alibi. It’s great to see other coworking facilities like Peloton Labs take up the idea and run (ride?) with it. We wish we had their square footage!

Lots of good things are happening in the design scene here in Portland that are encouraging. Abstract Conference, for one thing, is shaping up to be an amazing event.

So this spring has been full of win. Looking forward to a great summer!

Today is the fourth annual Blue Beanie Day. For the uninitiated, that stands for support of Web standards – a set of best practices for designing bulletproof, highly usable Web sites and Web applications, as well as ensuring open, affordable access to Web technologies.

The original preacher of Web standards was Jeffrey Zeldman, in his book, Designing with Web Standards. He wore a blue beanie on the cover, and the rest is history.

So if you see someone proudly wearing an indigo toque around Portland today, it could mean they are a Web designer who’s hip to the standards. Or, maybe their ears are chilly (it is Maine, you know).

A lot has changed over the last several years in the world of Web. In fact, I’ve been around so long I can remember when people used to complain about Netscape Navigator 4 the way they complain about Internet Explorer 6 (and they welcomed IE6 at the time).

One encouraging thing I’ve noticed over time is that even the most popular – yet horrendous – design techniques have been extinguished by demands for a good user experience. If you don’t provide a good user experience on your site, you are doomed, regardless of how much market share you have or how much you throw into your online marketing. Just ask MySpace, formerly the top social network and which finally cleaned up its act – and templates – in hopes of regaining its once-lofty positioning.

Here’s a list of five of the worst design techniques which – thankfully – you rarely see anymore:

Flash Web sites. These were created by designers who didn’t understand the mechanics of the Web, and how to design for different browsers and different conditions. Their solution was to create a design they could completely control. This often had unintended consequences, like forcing site visitors to do something that was inconsistent with the way they did things on other sites. Flash sites also don’t allow you to bookmark specific sets of content (they exist at one URL), and their content isn’t accessible to search engines (or the assistive devices used by many visually impaired people).

Splash pages. There’s a reason why everyone put a “skip intro” link on these Flash-rendered devices – people skipped them! Usability testing showed this over and over. It’s like forcing people to watch your TV commercial before they can enter your department store. Fortunately, this annoyance seems to be nearly extinct.

“this site is best viewed with…”. A few years ago, that sentence most often ended with “…Internet Explorer, version 7 at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768“. What it really said was “Our Web designers were too lazy to figure out how to design a site that worked in all browsers. Web Standards? What are they?” Now, with Internet Explorer’s market share dipping below 50% - and falling – virtually no one takes this approach any longer.

Back buttons that don’t go back. Usually deployed by incompetent, or lazy, developers who placed a javascript or redirect on one page to automatically forward a visitor to a second page upon taking some action. When hitting the back button, the redirect was triggered, sending the viewer right back where they were. What these insensitive programmers failed to realize is that roughly 40% of all clicks on the Web are on a browser’s back button, so they were triggering a tidal wave of annoyance. Good riddance.

spacer.gif. Untold terabytes of bandwidth was sacrificed earlier this decade so that less practiced designers could shim up their table-based layouts with cells that contained nothing but but a transparent graphic, often called “spacer.gif”. Table-based layouts, however, made design upgrades more time-consuming and more costly. Now, CSS-based designs and themes are the order of the day and all those spacers are no longer needed.

These, and many others like them, have gone the way of the dinosaur, rubbed out by the incontrovertible need to provide a good user experience to those who visit your Web site.

Is your favorite design quirk not listed? Let ‘er rip in the comments.

Dear Barclay’s,

How can I answer the following security question?

After…

Is this a trick question? One thing’s for sure: it’s not going to lower the call volume to your customer service center.

Amazingly, this is the error response I got when attempting to do a password reset for my LL Bean Visa card. They say I didn’t enter a response to a security question. Here’s the kicker – on the previous screen they never ask the security question (below), and it doesn’t appear on the error page either.

Before…

I suppose it’s possible I never created a security question/response when I set up the account (I can’t log in, so I can’t be sure), but the system should account for this use case somehow. In most cases I would think you wouldn’t be allowed to set up an account without creating a security question and response.

Makes me wonder how this gem slipped through their usability testing sessions.

Good thing they charge all those usage fees so they can hire big, strong Web development teams to build bulletproof Web sites…

Part Two in the Series: The Sausage Makers: Remaking the site of the Portland Music Foundation

When building a Web site, one obvious ingredient often gets overlooked, and that’s… the content. They say content is king, but in reality it is often mistreated as badly as the king’s jester. That can lead to a site that fails miserably, even though it may have a shiny new content management system or a glittering design concept.

What you need is a content strategy.

Content strategy is a practice that makes sure content gets treated like royalty (and it should be, because let’s face it, content is the reason people are coming to your site). It takes the who, what, when, where and why of content into account.

Allow me to demonstrate, using our friends at the Portland Music Foundation (whose site we’re redesigning) as an example.

Who. Obviously, we need to consider the needs of people who are coming to the site. More importantly, however, we need to think about who’s going to manage the content. In the case of the PMF, that task falls to president Pat May. Pat, like most of us, is very busy at his day job. He also doesn’t spend much time in front of a computer (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!). He needs a content management system that’s easy to use and that automates things like purchasing memberships, and allows others to self-publish content (while still giving him the ability to review and approve).

What. For PMF, it’s basically pretty simple: publish information that lets people know its mission, where they can attend upcoming events and seminars, and who is a part of the organization. Pemaquid has been cooking up some special features, but the challenge is to keep things simple so that Pat – or other PMF board members – can easily keep the site up to date. Many sites fail at the “what”, because they come up with ideas that are creative and terrific but are difficult to execute given the “who” (see above).

When. Again, this is straightforward for PMF: the Web site needs to be available anytime from anywhere, both for visitors and for content producers. On some sites, like bank sites or news organizations, there’s a regular cycle when people visit the site that can lead to spikes (and then dips) in traffic as visitors hit it all at the same time.

Where. Where will visitors and content producers usually be editing content on the site? At their bustling office at work? At the library? On the comfy couch at home? Any special considerations should be taken into account.

Why. You need to ask this question early and often when building a Web site, and it’s the key to a successful content strategy. Why would anyone appreciate your Flash intro? (also, ask yourself “why do they always need to put a ‘skip into’ link there if it’s such a useful part of the site ;-) Why have a “What’s New” section on your home page if no one has time to update it? Why build a content management gizmo for your FAQs if they only get updated once a year? Asking “Why?” helps you put those grandiose ambitions you cooked during the brainstorming session into their proper perspective.

With the PMF, content strategy is ‘why’ there won’t be any elaborate features that require time-intensive management from administrators. That doesn’t mean the site won’t have any creative, unique features or a great design. More on that coming soon…

If you live in Portland, Maine, you already know that it has more restaurants than any city in America that isn’t named San Francisco. With that in mind, Pemaquid helped create Salute to Sous, a tribute to some of the fine fare cooked up by some of the best sous chefs in town, for Oakhurst Dairy.

There are recipes from a dozen of Portland’s finest restaurants and we’ve built an interactive map to show you where to find each culinary creation. You might want to create a short list of your favorites and hit them up during November, which has been declared Salute to Sous Month.

While building this special feature, Jordan and I had to wear bibs during the late afternoon hours to avoid drooling all over our keyboards.

Do you have a favorite?

Salute to Sous Recipes

You know the show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? Builders (and camera crews) arrive on the scene and transform someone’s humble abode-in-need into a dream house.

For some time now I’ve thought it would be really interesting – and potentially a lot of fun – to put together a similar project remaking someone’s Web site. Hopefully it would be an opportunity to teach people a little about what makes for good Web design.

This month all the right ingredients seemed to have come together. So get ready for…. Extreme Makeover: Web Site Edition.

Your Master Carpenters will be a team of seasoned Web designers in Portland, Maine, headed up by myself and Suzy Massey. Suzy runs her own design shop, Phoenix Massey Studio, is active in the TechMaine Web Design User Group, and she’s teamed up w/Pemaquid a time or two. Suzy has her black belt in Web standards based design, CSS and is a WordPress whiz.

Our humble apprentices for the project include four students from George Larou‘s Web design class at the Maine College of Art. These kids have solid design skills but want to beef up their HTML/CSS chops. What better way to do that than on a real-life project, guided by experienced pros?

We had our first meetup on Friday and are off to a good start, with the student designers working up comps. This will give us the chance to talk about the constraints imposed on graphic design when applying it to the Web.

So who’s the Client? All in good time, my friends. In the meantime, as they say, stay tuned to this station.

Part One in the Series: The Sausage Makers: Remaking the site of the Portland Music Foundation

They say that making laws is like making sausages: you don’t want to know how it’s done, you just want to know that what you get at the end tastes good.

For a long time now I’ve thought that that notion doesn’t apply to Web sites. I think there are lots of folks out there who want to know how a good Web site comes together. And making sure a site’s built right is essential; the best online marketing plan won’t work if your site isn’t effective and easy for both customers and administrators to use.

With that in mind, today I present The Sausage Makers – an inside look at how a real live Web site comes together here at Pemaquid Communications. We’ll talk about our things like Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Content Management, Design Concept Development, e-commerce and Search Engine Optimization as well as some of the techniques we employ in Interface Production (“front-end” coding) and Development (“back-end” coding).

We’ll also be talking about our user-centered philosophy and coding sites to be accessible to the visually/physically impaired.

And we’re going to do things completely out in the open.

If all that doesn’t sound sexy to you, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve found the perfect Client to make things interesting: The Portland Music Foundation. The PMF is dedicated to developing the music scene in Portland, Maine. They provide workshops and resources to musicians (as the bass player in Bluezberry Jam, I’ve availed myself of their very worthwhile services) and work to forge a musical identity for the area. It’s an innovative venture modeled after a similar organization in Austin, Texas – and we all know what amazing music comes out of that town!

PMF President Pat May has agreed to let people view the site development as it unfolds. We’ll be making a link to our development site available so you’ll have a backstage pass for all the festivities.

We thought it would be apropos to team up with graphic designer – and rocker – Walter Craven, front man of Lost On Liftoff, who will be working up the look of the new site. If you didn’t know it already, Walt does beautiful work, most recently as a designer with Accel Golf. He last teamed up with us at Pemaquid to create the look and feel for local club The Big Easy, a site that was nominated for a techMaine Best of the Web award a few years back. When we approached PMF with the idea for this project, and let them know we were working with Walt… well, that sealed the deal.

So get ready to strap on your hardhat and feel free to move about the job site as we nail the boards together. And keep your dial tuned to Pemaquid Crunch for updates on the design and development process.

No, this isn’t a post about the Web sites of Zoe Duchesne or Genevieve Morton, though I have now insidiously optimized this post for those names (see, search engine marketing isn’t hard at all). This piece has to do with the design of a particular class of Web sites. (No, not *those* Web sites. Get your mind out of the gutter!)

A “Supermodel” site is one that looks incredibly pretty, but will break a nail or a heel when asked to do anything “athletic” (interactive). The graphic design of a supermodel site actually gets in the way of a slick, sleek user experience.

Often, supermodel sites are built by agencies that have great graphic artists but who lack decent coding skills. And that level of talent doesn’t work for the Web; you need to strike a balance between visual design and code.

How can agencies avoid building a supermodel site? The key is to focus on the user experience and concentrate on the things a person (like a real-life supermodel, for example) should *do* when they come to a site (‘What would Heidi Klum do if she saw this page?…’). Thinking like that helps you stay on the right track.

Now I have nothing against supermodels; I like them as much as the next guy. But your Web site isn’t a supermodel. Ideally, it’s more athletic, like, say, Lindsey Vonn, Natalie Gulbis or Ana Ivanovic (see, there’s that SEO thing again).

It might seem strange to you, but I cringe whenever someone describes me or my team as “geeks”. The moniker makes me uncomfortable because I don’t think it promotes a healthy perspective on what we at Pemaquid do for our Clients.

To me, a geek, is a person who loves technology for its own sake. Someone who becomes enraptured by the thought of another great CSS3 (text-shadow FTW!) or HTML5 technique (Oh. Sweet. Modernizr!)

It can set up a certain elitist way of looking at the world. I’ve been privy to many a conversation where Web designers labeled themselves as geeks as a way of telling themselves that they and their pals knew something that the other mere mortals did not. If you’re not careful, you can become quite a snob (I’ll be honest: I’ve been there and back a few times), and that’s an unhealthy way to look at Clients and your community.

Don’t get me wrong. I think you have to love what you do, you should feel good about what makes you special, and you should be curious and fascinated by what you do for a living. But I think it’s more important to focus on how cutting edge technology can help solve problems for people and make the Web a less confusing, cluttered place.

So call us geeks if you like, but we won’t look at things that way. We’re really just people like you – your friendly neighborhood Web-slingers – who have a superpower or two that you might need when it comes to the Web.

The iPad, and other ebook-readers that are fully capable of browsing the Web, will slowly but surely (OK, maybe not so slowly) change the way Web sites are designed. That’s because they offer a new user experience when it comes to consuming online content.

It’s not too surprising when you stop and think about it. The iPad and its ilk create a new kind of user experience. With the iPad, it’s easier than ever to casually kick back on the couch and flick through Web pages, as you would a magazine. Imagine casually doing anything with a laptop.

As a result, Web design will change to make this type of “casual browsing” (is that redundant?) a more interesting and pleasurable experience. I predict Web layouts will become more magazine-like, with home pages that have large, lush photography and large headline fonts that tease you deeper into a site.

Other advances in CSS, HTML5 and browser technology will also play into making this new user experience more lively and engaging.

At Pemaquid we’ve already begun moving in that direction and are taking the iPad and similar devices into account. A perfect example is the new Web site of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra, launched last month. The bold, expansive imagery dominates the home page on a laptop or desktop monitor with a landscape layout, but it displays a quite a different – yet still successful – composition on the iPad’s narrower, taller screen.

The shape of things to come.

Clients always hope that a site redesign project can be turned around overnight. We haven’t quite hit that target yet here at Pemaquid, but last month we did manage to redesign the Web site of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra in only a fortnight.

A big reason was the new Content Manager we’ve recently built using the Django Open Source framework. In 2010, Pemaquid has built more than a dozen Django sites (including 3 e-commerce sites) and with each site the process becomes easier – and much faster – as we hone our standard CMS package. With Django, once a module – like News, Events, Resources, Jobs or a Directory – is developed, it’s a simple matter to plug in to the next site like so many lego blocks in very little time.

Another reason is our expertise in Content Strategy. A solid Content Strategy considers the content available for a particular Web site (not surprisingly) but also the manpower available to manage that content.

In the case of the MSO, we needed to keep things simple. They had very basic content management needs (news, events/concerts, testimonials/reviews, a simple contact form and a series of article-pages). With the Pemaquid Content Manager they can update every page on the site, except for a couple of Google Maps for their venues. These administrators don’t have a lot of time for updates, but fortunately their content doesn’t change much throughout the course of the season.

There were limited creative assets to work with (a logo and a few photographs taken by orchestra members) so “simple elegance” was our mantra in pulling together the look and feel. We did want to tie into what another graphic designer was doing in creating other collateral such as posters and a program in order to make sure the branding was as cohesive as possible.

Fortunately, we had all the content in hand at the get-go, which helped tremendously in turning the site around quickly.

We did want to take a state of the art approach to layout, and we considered how the new site would look on an iPad as well as on a desktop or laptop monitor. That’s why the home page has large, expansive photos and a feel similar to a magazine cover or a poster. A lot of the essential information is readily available on the home page and teases you further into the site.

We used rgba semi-transparency on the home page, one of the latest CSS3 techniques, to lay the logo masthead over the photography and, as always, we built the site with bulletproof, standards-compliant xHTML with accessibility in mind.

The Midcoast Symphony, a community orchestra led by conductor Rohan Smith, is a truly extraordinary ensemble of volunteer musicians who perform solely for the love of great classical music. If you live in Portland or Midcoast Maine, it’s well worth catching one of their performances at Topsham’s Orion Performing Arts Center or at the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston. Yes, you can friend ‘em on Facebook, and if you ask nicely maybe I’ll slip you a few tickets from the batch we received as part of the Web site redesign project.