Pemaquid Communications

There’s a lot of news this morning about a new computing device from Microsoft called the Surface.

It’ll be rolled out first in hotels and perhaps the local coffee shop…

When you add features to a Web site (or Swiss Army Knife), does it make it easier to use? Umm, no.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that takes place during the development of any type of product. More and more features are requested and often packed into the product to satisfy customer demand, but when the product is launched, many of those features are never used.

It’s called The Feature Paradox. It’s like the old 80-20 rule: 80 percent of people will use 20 percent of an interactive Web site’s features. But they always seem to want those other features, those bells and whistles – like some insurance policy – in case they’re ever needed.

If you’re responsible for redesigning your company’s Web site, you might want to remember The Feature Paradox and avoid adding functionality that will be used only in edge cases. Focusing on usability – how people in your organization will use your Web site – can help keep you from spending excessive time and money on features that people will rarely use and which in some cases might not even contribute to a project’s ROI.

(Tip of the hat to Typestorming)

Many people in our business talk a lot about the importance of “Web Strategy”. In most cases that means investing in search engine optimization to bring people to your Web site. It’s a sales pitch that’s pretty easy to grasp – if you get more people to your site, in theory you’ll get more sales.

But if your Web site isn’t well designed, all the money spent on Web Strategy will be wasted. You’ll be bringing people over from Google to see… a really-bad-Web-site. People don’t stick around really-bad-Web-sites that are clunky… confusing… hard to use… hijack the Back Button… don’t allow you to bookmark backpages (Flash sites are notorious for this)… Most importantly, people don’t buy stuff from them.

Businesses that invest in search engine optimization but that have a really-bad-Web-site end up like the Boy Who Cried Wolf – they may have the #1 position in Google, but after a while nobody pays attention.

Don’t get me wrong – having a Web Strategy is a great idea – but it’s even more important to make sure you get the Web Design right.

Portland Diner is a restaurant directory we created and we’ve been playing around with it for awhile now. When it was first built, no other local site would let you search for a “Thai place in Yarmouth that has ‘Royal‘ (or something like that)” in the name.

In other words, you might know where the place was and maybe part of its name, but no site would let you track it down.

Portland Diner takes care of that. And it’s a good learning tool for Web-heads; we’ve been letting people kick the design, CSS and programming around – a Portland Web designer’s sandbox, if you will.

We’re planning on adding some additional features, such as the ability for anyone to add a review, and for restaurant owners to add a menu and maybe photos of the dining room. Stay tuned, and in the meantime – Bon Appetit!

Here’s a pretty big sign that Flash does-not-a-Web-site make:  MTV recently scrapped the Flash version of their Web site and launched an HTML version.

After a nine-month run, MTV admitted that the Flash site was “something of a headache” for viewers.  The company says page load times have been “drastically reduced” (no more ‘loading…’ messages).  You can read more about the MTV site redesign on the MTV Labs blog.

They don’t mention other short-comings of Flash, such as the inability to bookmark specific content.

Pemaquid has launched a redesigned Web site for the Southern Midcoast Maine Chamber, the chamber of commerce based in Topsham and which represents the towns from Brunswick to Wiscasset.

We loaded it up w/alot of goodies found on no other Chamber of Commerce site in Maine, including:

• An Interactive Regional Map that is a Google Maps Mashup. Want to know where the Sebasco Harbor Resort Golf Course or Popham Beach are located? Check the box and see the Google dart.
• the swfIR (pronounced “swif-fer”) for spiffing up (I guess that’s “swiffing up”) ordinary photos that Chamber staff upload through the site’s content management system. The swfIR adds borders, shading and other effects on the fly but still supports the site’s standards-based design concept. You can see the swfIR in action dressing up the photos on the left side of the home page.
• MyMidcoast – a handy, basic, trip planner that allows people who sign up for an account to collect a list of events, restaurants, lodging establishments and activities for their next visit to Midcoast Maine.
• Microformatting of listings in the Member Directory that allows you to save a business’ contact information as a vcard and import it into a desktop address book application like MS Outlook.

The site also has a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, allowing every one of the Chamber’s 700+ members to log in at any time and update their member listings and post news and events, all moderated by Chamber staff. MidcoastMaine.com also boasts a simple ad server and e-commerce features.

We know lots about real estate agents, lawyers, doctors, butchers, bakers and candelstick makers, but when it comes to Web designers worldwide (let alone Web designers in Maine) there’s not alot of information about who’s doing what. Jeffrey Zeldman and the folks at A List Apart are aiming to change all that with the first annual Web Design Survey.

Tonight I took the survey – yes, on a Friday night, I have no life offline, folks – and if you’re a designer, you should too (um, no, I didn’t mean you should take it on Friday night).

Hopefully, finding out more about Web designers in general is a first step towards doing something that could be considered even more important – developing Best Practices and professional standards for the industry. (Kind of like a Web Standards Project for the people who do design, perhaps?)

In a way, it’s interesting to think that there are licensing procedures or certifications for other professions (like those real estate agents, lawyers and doctors) but none that I can think of for the guy who’s going to design your e-commerce app.