Pemaquid Communications

Is it just me or did the Internet (not) seem a little sluggish today from all the excess traffic?

Today is Cyber Monday, the Monday immediately following Black Friday and supposedly the day when e-tailers’ online sales surge like the rush for a Blue Light Special.

Only trouble is, The Legend of Cyber Monday is just that - a myth, concocted by marketing consultants to spur their Clients into Web site upgrades to prepare for a virtual tsunami.

Cyber Monday historically has not been the most popular online shopping day. In fact, according to Business Week, it’s only the 12th biggest sales day online.

That’s not to say your Maine Web site shouldn’t be ready for business today. It’s just important to remember that your site should be ready for business every day.

Naturally, good Web design should be the most important part of your Web strategy, this Monday and every Monday. That’s right, even more important than your search engine marketing plan. Because today - or any day - it’s not going to matter if you’re the #1 result in Google if people click on over and find that your site is hard to use.

See you on Cyber Tuesday….

Pemaquid’s adventures on Facebook are the subject of a story in today’s Portland Press Herald (Just my luck, I got a haircut the day after they took the photo, and no, you won’t see it here).

Thanks to my Facebook buddies Wendy Clark (Portland Diner logo) and Jennifer Ecker (Web design) for their help in creating Pemaquid’s Facebook apps. Thanks also to Facebook friend Justin Ellis (PPH reporter who wrote the story), who gave us a very “honorable mention”.

Our apps mentioned in the story:

• Portland Diner
• Lost on Liftoff

More are on the way. Stay tuned…

Sorry to bring up the subject of “snow” (but hey! we had flurries in Portland yesterday so I don’t feel too bad).

Pemaquid has launched a redesigned Web site for the Maine Snow and Ice Sculpting Foundation. They are best known for the frosty carvings we’ve seen in year’s past at the Maine Winterfest events in Falmouth.

In addition to a new look, MS&I wanted to be able to quickly and easily update content throughout the site. For that, we installed the Pemaquid Content Manager, our user-friendly content management system.

With it, Foundation personnel can update copy and create photo galleries as needed.

Keep an eye on this site for news about the Maine State Snow Sculpting Championship, taking place February 14-17, and stay tuned for the World’s Tallest Sandcastle.

From today’s Dilbert:

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Au contraire, mon ami! Usability is the most important piece of your Web strategy. Without it, the money spent on design, programming and especially search engine optimization will be wasted.

I’d like to thank Shirley Helfrich, Thomas Bennett and the folks at the Prince Memorial Library and everyone at the Southern Maine Library District for inviting me to speak the other day about Web site usability at their annual conference. Thanks for the opportunity, the thoughtful questions - and for not throwing tomatoes!

Here are some of the tips I mentioned (and some I did not), as well as some links to resources you might find useful.

Usability

• people don’t read Web pages, they scan them support that scanning activity by “chunkifying” the content on your pages (use headings, subheadings, lists, meaningful link text)
• don’t use “click here” in your link text. It’s wastes space. Use either an action word (”shop”, “review”) or a descriptive word (”apples”, “oranges”) that describes what the person will see when clicking
• if you want someone to click on something, make it look like a button
• if you want someone to read something, make it a text link (not a graphic; see banner blindness
• if it’s a link, underline it; if it’s not, don’t underline
• when linking to PDFs, spreadsheets and other files, put the filetype and the size of the file in the link text (big pdf file (PDF - 1.7MB)
• avoid uploading/linking files that are more than, say, 4MB in size (see Attack of the Giant PDF)
• don’t use “What’s New” (it gets old fast)
• review your traffic stats to see what how people are moving through your site and which sections of your site are generating the most traffic

Accessibility

• provide “alt text” for all images on your Web pages
• use relative sizing for fonts (%, rather than pixels)
• ideally, use CSS to layout your site (less code, easier for assistive devices to interpret properly)
• in forms - remember to use labels and associate labels with the proper form field - learn more
• don’t use color as the only way to represent information (as in: red = “bad”; red=”required”)

Resources

• Watchfire’s Webexact accessibility checker - great for spot-checking your work
• Web developer Toolbar for Firefox - a ton of useful tools for accessibility/usability built right into the browser
• World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative - the standards for accessible Web site design, from the folks who brought you HTML
• Section 508 - federal standards for software accessibility
• Sim Daltonism - tool for viewing Web pages as a colorblind person might see them
• W3C Markup validation service - essential tool for making sure your Web pages are coded properly
• Dreamweaver - easy to use Web editor; the latest version has excellent support for CSS
• Coda - great little Web editor; helps you work faster. For advanced users comfortable hand-coding (Mac only)
• Accessible Photo Gallery - this gallery meets the criteria for accessible display of photos, uses progressive enhancement to meet needs of viewers
• CSS1 reference guide and CSS2 reference guide - from CSS guru Eric Meyer

Books

• Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug) - easy read; reveals how people really interact w/Web pages, and how you can take advantage in your design
• Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cederholm) - shows how you can use CSS to tackle common design challenges
• Designing with Web Standards (Jeffrey Zeldman) - Zeldman explains why Web standard design techniques are the way to go

Ladies and Gentlemen… we have Liftoff. Lost on Liftoff. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

Pemaquid Communications premiered a brand new Facebook app for Lost On Liftoff, one of Portland, Maine’s hottest local bands, @ the techMaine conference a few days ago.

Go here to add the Lost On Liftoff app if you have a Facebook profile.

The idea is pretty simple. Once you add the app, it puts a “badge” on your Facebook profile, along w/a player created in FBML (that’s “Facebook Markup Language”) that allows you to play your favorite Lost On Lifoff song from their latest album, Mixtape Blackouts. You can change the favorite song if you like and invite other friends and fans to add the app to their profiles.

For the band, it’s viral marketing at its best. Pemaquid launched (no pun intended) the app just a few days ago and - through the power of Facebook’s social graph - it already has several dozen people using it.

Lead singer Walt Craven did the amazing album artwork and is working with us to redesign the group’s Web site.

Rock on!

More from recent wanderings about the ‘Net:

• Mystery of the flat input buttons in Leopard - explained! - Have you noticed flat form inputs in Safari 3/Leopard? Dominey gives you the skinny.
• No more ‘click to activate’ - soon you won’t have to click to activate that control in the IE browser that makes an object play. Microsoft has licensed the component in question from Eolas. I think we’ll still use SWFObject and UFO, though. (Ajaxian)
• Anatomy of a good Web page (hotlinked image) - good markup, w/t/Cliff notes…
• Foamee - brought to you by Dan Cederholm. Ever wanted to keep track of who owes you a beer - and who you owe? Dan’s app makes it go down smooth. I’m linking you right to the How-to page…

Cheers!

Facebook apps continue to take the online marketing world by storm. For the uninitiated, a Facebook app is kinda like a widget that FB members can add to their profiles.

Pemaquid has several under development now. We’re the first Web design company in Maine (and so far, still the only one, though competitors are starting to get a little jealous) to have developed 3rd-party Facebook apps.

A good example of an app is Portland Diner (you’ve got to be logged into Facebook to see it, though there is a stand-alone site).

Why is this so important to marketers? One word: eyeballs.

Some of these FB apps have millions of members using them, so they become attractive advertising vehicles. Of course, you have to position things carefully so that the advertising message doesn’t cause the user experience to be a drag.

I’m going to be giving a presentation on Facebook apps at the MESDA techMAINE Annual Conference tomorrow. If you’re curious to learn the basic ins and outs come on down and check it out.