Pemaquid Communications

No this is not about hiring a Web Designer for Pemaquid - though that’ll happen soon enough - it’s about how to select the company that’s going to build or redesign your site.

Recently I was reading an article in which the question was whether a potential Client should pick a Web design firm based on how much experience the Web design company had in the Client business’ industry.

I’d wager that that misses the point. When selecting a Web design firm - whether your business is in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon - the most important thing is not how much the designer knows about your industry, it’s how much they know about Web design.

There are plenty of firms out there w/marketing expertise in a particular industry, and they even may have built lots of sites, but all the industry savvy in the world will not help them understand the psychology of how people surf a Web site and how to make that site engaging and easy-to-use - a resource for its audiences.

Pemaquid Communications seeks an Interface Producer to develop Web sites for our growing list of Clients. The ideal candidate is someone who has developed a solid understanding of the basic building block of HTML and CSS and wants to expand his/her skills and learn more about the latest techniques and Web Standards from a leader in Web design in Maine.

This will be a part-time position to start (10-20 hours per week) that, for the right person, could evolve into full-time membership on our team.

Pemaquid Communications seeks a Creative Services Coordinator to work with the company Principal, Clients and Creative Staff to ensure that Clients’ business objectives are met and that creative staff has project assets and understanding-of-needs to deliver quality Web design work. Ideal candidate will have excellent communications skills; previous experience in a creative environment or advertising agency setting is highly desirable.

Position will be part-time (10-20 hours per week) to start, working on key Client assignments; the goal is to make this a full-time position as the amount of project work increases.

The Eagle Has Landed (sorry, I always wanted to say that…)

If you haven’t already, you might want to join the rapidly-growing group of people who are making the EagleCam, managed by the BioDiversity Research Institute of Gorham, Maine, one of the most popular sites on the Web. So far, viewers have seen romance (eagle-style), battles-against-the-elements (the birds have braved four storms, including an unusually heavy snowfall), suspense (had their eggs survived those storms?) and a surprise plot twist (a chick was born April 11 after biologists had concluded that the birds had failed to keep the eggs warm enough to make it through the cold, harsh spring).

The EagleCam is proving to be Must-See TV. When the eagles returned to their nest about a month ago, the folks at BRI said traffic to the site exploded to 8 million hits in a single day as a result of an Associate Press story on the topic. Traffic died down a bit afterwards, but now that there’s a chick to watch, you can bet there will be another, even bigger spike.

There are a handful of eagle cams out there, but apparently at least Google seems to think BRI’s is important: It’s the #1 search result for “EagleCam”.

In late February BRI asked Pemaquid Communications to redesign the site. The challenge was to get the new look in place before the new addition to the family arrived. How it got done is a case study that could be the subject of a separate post, and the site is still a work in progress, but we got the major features/pages in place.

Future work may include working with National Geographic (provides the live feed) to upgrade the presentation of the live cam object code to bring it in line with Web Standards, placing the rest of the low-traffic back pages into the new look and feel and possibly putting together a photo gallery (BRI has tons of great wildlife photography). And don’t forget the EagleCam Blog (updated by wildlife biologists) and… the LoonCam (inactive right now).

Stay tuned…..

A couple of weeks ago the boys over at Happy Cog released to the wild an updated version of the swfir (pronounced “swif-fer”). For those keeping score, SWFIR stands for “Shockwave Flash Image Replacement”, and it’s an easy way to give the images on your Web site a little zing.

To get it to work, you add the swfir javascript function in the head tag of your page and then a 3-line javascript just before the close-body tag. The script looks for any image on your Web page with a class of “swfir” and replaces it w/a Flash object based on that image.

You can easily adjust the script parameters to give your target image a:

• border
• rounded corners
• shadow
• tilt

…and more. You can see a demo on swfir.com.

What’s more, the swfir was designed to support standards-based design concepts and works on all the major browsers.
This is a great feature for Web designers to add to sites with simple content management systems and that will be used by people with little knowledge of graphic design to upload photos. Instead of posting simple - and sometimes bland - photography, by building the swfir into a dynamic page template designers can easily make these sites look more sophisticated and professional.
Pemaquid is actually building the swfir into a new version of the Pemaquid Content Manager on site we’ll be launching in the next two weeks. Stay tuned for that.