Pemaquid Communications

I had a great day on Friday. I walked into a local coffee shop who’s wi-fi wasn’t working (that’s not the great part) and noticed a Client enjoying a cup of joe. I walked over and said hello, and she introduced me to her companion this way:

…I’d like you to meet Rob Landry of Pemaquid Communications. He’s one of the best Web designers in Maine…

Wow. Very humbling. I can’t take even half the credit. I am very lucky to have a great team working with me.

A little later, a voicemail greeted me when I returned to the office. As is typical of people who call Pemaquid Communications, the caller was looking for a Web site (you didn’t think he wanted a turkey club on whole wheat, did you?)

I called back and after discussing the potential project, I asked the prospect, as I usually do, how he found out about Pemaquid. His answer:

I went to Google, entered “Web design Portland Maine”, saw your Web site, and called because you guys looked like you know what you’re doing.

Double wow, Batman.

Nobody’s perfect, but we must be doing something right. Thanks to our Clients for placing their trust in us, and thanks to Jen, Jamie, Sarah, Louise, Wendy and all the rest who help make it look easy.

If you have OS X, you might want to check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s dashboard. I’ve swiped the screen shot (below); he’s got links to some of the widgets you see.

At Pemaquid, we’ve never won any awards for our Web design (we have come close) and we don’t care if we never do.

Often, the criteria for winning a design award and the criteria for making something useful are completely different.

Donald A. Norman, of the Nielsen-Norman group, in his book The Design of Everyday Things illustrates this point wonderfully in telling how two office buildings were designed:

There really were two designs: one in Seattle, with heavy participation by the users, and one in Los Angeles, designed in the conventional manner by architects. Which design do the users prefer? Why the Seattle one, of course. Which one got the award? Why the Los Angeles one, of course.

Aesthetics are important, for sure. But in designing Web sites for our Clients, we’ll pick useful over award-winning every time.

OK, so you’ve decided you want to add a blog to your Web site - a good move since. pound for pound, frequently-updated sites tend to grab higher search engine rankings than their peers who go without. So you download a copy of Wordpress, an open source blog platform that has all the features you’re looking for. Great.

Next, you want your blog to have the same look and feel - theme, if you will - as the rest of your Web site. Your designer cracks open the Wordpress blog in Dreamweaver and gasps at all the PHP code in the templating system. Skilled as she is with HTML, your designer can’t make heads or tails of the CSS or PHP.

Not to worry. Pemaquid has designed Wordpress blogs for a number of Clients. In fact, this blog you’re reading is a Wordpress blog (though an imperfect one - ever heard the one about the cobbler’s children who had no shoes?).

So if you’re looking to add a Wordpress blog (or Typepad blog, or any other flavor), contact us and we’ll get you set up. We’ll do it fast too (48 hour turnaround is doable), if necessary.

If you’re a Web designer, 2007 is the year that Internet Explorer 6 became “the new Netscape 4″. Actually, no, things could never be that bad again, but when you’re designing Web sites using CSS and Web standards, IE6 is the one that now throws up the most humdingers.

A question I often hear from other designers is why, with IE7 and Firefox offering better support for Web standards, aren’t more people upgrading from IE6? (The latest browser statistics show IE6 use falling from about 42% to 36% during the past 8 months.)

The reason has to do with usability and cost-benefit analysis.

While most Web designers wouldn’t dream of using IE6 as their primary browser these days, especially with add-ons like the Web developer toolbar and Firebug available for Firefox, it works just fine for what most people want to do online. Checking email, reading up on sports scores and stock prices, buying shirts from LL Bean and using social network sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace all can be done just fine w/IE6. There’s no compelling reason to switch.

Kevin Hale of Particle Tree has written an interesting article on the subject.

The upshot for Web designers? Remember to focus on usability when working with Clients to design features for an interactive Web site. Think about how customers, employees and other groups will do on your site before investing a lot of development time in creating a cool Web site feature that won’t get used all that much.

And it looks like IE6 will be with us for some time to come.

Eric Meyer, one of the zen masters of CSS coding, has a new product out called CSS Sculptor that makes creating Web standards compliant layouts as easy as pie.

CSS Sculptor integrates w/Dreamweaver, and has templates for more than two dozen of the most common layouts, whether they be fixed-width, liquid, fruit-juicy or nutty-crunchy.

So if you’re a Web designer who’s just coming up the CSS learning curve, you might consider adding CSS Sculptor to your tool kit. Rock on!