Pemaquid Communications

I surfed over to a certain Maine Web site the other day and found that it had been redesigned. Here is the site navigational structure:

Can anyone tell me with 100% certainty what those items represent?

Therein lies the problem. You can’t tell what you’re going to get when you click (you can’t even tell that you can click). The only hint that this is the site navigation is that it is positioned in the spot where, if you’ve surfed for any length of time, you know that navigation is usually found.

Here’s the site, btw, if you’d now like to see that nav positioned within the overall layout.

(I don’t mean to pick on Downeast. They’re a great company and their Web site is far better than the previous version. I’m just using their site to show how you can improve the user experience on sites you design.)

Navigation is best as text. Text that is unambiguous. “About” is more effective than “Who We Are“.

Lo and behold, when you mouseover the nav on this site in question, you see a… word.

There are two big reasons why you should use text in you site navigation.

Usability. There’s an excellent book on Web design by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think. In it, Krug points out usability studies show that people usually don’t read Web sites – until they’ve found that article they were searching for – they scan them. Navigational text that is simple and clear supports this scanning activity. With graphics, you have to stop and think (”hmmm… what could a camera mean?…”) This is why icons, unless they are universally understood, are also poor choices for navigational labels on Web sites.

Accessibility. In the example above, if you were visually impaired and came upon this site, there would be no way for you to understand that the images represented the site navigation. It would be much better to place navigational items towards the top of your HTML as a list of text links and to then use CSS to style the list to match your overall design concept.

Web site designs like the one in question point to a larger issue in Web design, which I call The Tyranny of Graphic Design. That’s a topic for another day, but briefly, Web design is not graphic design. It’s interaction design (of which graphic design is certainly a part). In creating Web sites, designers should take care that the graphical design concepts they produce make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on a site, not harder.

Don’t make me think…

Joe Michaud, president of MaineToday.com, is announcing that he is leaving April 30 to start his own consulting business. Joe says he’ll be focusing on helping newspaper companies change their strategies and is convinced newspaper companies can survive.

If anyone can do it, it’s Joe Michaud, but I am very skeptical.

Back in the day, newspapers were the first true “information companies”. People picked up the Sunday paper for all sorts of reasons: news, sports, classifieds, community calendar, auto ads, coupons – and so on. The newspaper worked b/c it combined all that information in a neat package that was easy to deliver and had something for everyone.

Now, there’s a new place to go to get all the information you need – your computer, connected to the Internet.

Want to know who won Best Actor in 1943? Google it.

Want to know about an obscure topic like domain tasting? Ask Wikipedia.

Speaking of Wikipedia, does anyone still buy encyclopedias anymore? Encyclopedias, like newspapers, provided a wealth of information. Alas, for Britannica salesmen, that information is now easily available online.

There’s an article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal on How We Get News (in the future). In it, there’s this line:

…in the next decade we won’t use newspapers or television news programs to decide what stories we see each day…

One big key for newspapers going forward is going to be relevance. I know one person who recently dropped his subscription to the Portland Press Herald b/c on his Sunday paper, above the fold, were two headlines – one on Paris Hilton’s release from prison, the other on the upcoming final episode of the Sopranos (this is not a joke).

Newspapers will have to do a much better job understanding what is relevant to their best customers. To make matters worse for them, the Internet is making it easier for small teams to disseminate high quality information that meets or exceeds what can be provided by the local newspaper team. Probably the worst news of all for publishers is that as people spend more time online, advertisers are finding a more cost-effective way to market their brands than through ads in the local paper.

I worked for Joe Michaud at MaineToday.com a few years ago. It was a great experience all the way around. Joe was an innovator, and there were lots of creative people on staff (and then there was me . The main reason I didn’t stick around is b/c I was pessimistic about the long-term prospects for newspapers. I figured they might be gone before Joe retired and I’d have a shot at a promotion.

If anyone can help newspapers succeed in the 21st century, it’s Joe Michaud, and I wish him well. But because of the way people get information these days, I think it’s doubtful the newspaper as we know it will survive. In the near future, I predict publications using content from professional journalists will look quite different than they do today, will cater to narrower niche markets, and will in all likelihood not enjoy the regional monopoly of the local newspaper companies of today.

We’ve always had this crazy idea – what if we remade someone’s e-commerce Web site from the ground up, the way they remodel those houses on that TV show?

Well, we put out the word and the response was truly overwhelming – we received requests from roughly 50 Maine businesses who were looking for a makeover. We want to thank them all for their interest. We feel lucky to have had so many worthy candidates to choose from!

We’ve made a selection, and we expect to launch the site in late spring. We’ll be receiving input from students of an e-commerce and marketing class at the University of Southern Maine.

In selecting our Makeover candidate, our first stop was the existing Web site. Then we spoke with some of the business owners to get a sense of their online sales goals. Other things we considered in finding the best fit:

Variety of products. Some candidates sell only one product, and while it’s great to do one thing well, we were looking for a Maine business with several different products in a number of different categories.

Well-defined brand. With our Extreme Makeover, we wanted to focus squarely on the Web site redesign; we didn’t want to spend a lot of time remaking a small business’ image. The brand had to be clearly defined – our job will be to execute the brand strategy through the Web site design.

Existing e-commerce system. Some businesses we considered were locked into an existing e-commerce framework that would have been expensive or time-consuming to rework. The ideal candidate would have more flexibility in terms of the e-commerce systems we wanted to deploy.

We want to tip our cap to the Maine Products Marketing Program for helping put out the word to the hundreds of small Maine businesses who are members of their program.

So who’s the lucky winner of Extreme Makeover? Sorry to keep you in suspense, but we’re going to keep that under wraps for now. Stay tuned to this space for more details as the project unfolds.

As if we needed more evidence that going anywhere near Network Solutions’ Web site is a very, very bad idea (notice I’m not linking you to them) , word is spreading across the ‘Net that NetSol is using a highly questionable tactic to try to boost its flagging sales of domain name registrations.

Here’s what happens: if you do a whois search for “anyolddomainname.com” on the NetSol site, if it’s available, within seconds the registrar will reserve the name itself, meaning that if you search for a name, then decide you want to buy it later on from another registrar offering a better price (which all of them do) you’re out of luck.

Registering a domain name through Network Solutions has never been a good deal. They charge $35/year. GoDaddy, the market leader, charges about $8/year. NetSol has always relied upon its name recognition to attract the uninitiated to its ridiculously expensive service.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when you’re looking to find out if that cool domain name you just thought up is available for registration:

1. Friends DO NOT let friends use Network Solutions to register a domain name. NetSol costs 400% more than most other registrars, and they make it very difficult to transfer your name to another (i.e. cheaper) registrar at a later date.
2. DO use a a basic service like Whois.sc (Domain Tools)
3. Do not simply type the domain into your favorite browser to determine whether a name is available. A “Server not found” message simply tells you the domain hasn’t been set up to serve Web pages. It’s possible the name may be owned, but hasn’t been set up.
4. While no one has reported that other registrars, like GoDaddy or Register.com, have copied NetSol’s tactics, remember that there’s no guarantee they won’t in the future. I kinda doubt GoDaddy will resort to this, because they’ve got a good thing going with their name registration business. Register.com? It could happen.
5. If you were unlucky enough to search for a name on NetSol, only to have them reserve the name before you could buy it @ GoDaddy, take heart – Network Solutions isn’t actually buying the name, they are setting it aside for a 5-day grace period under a byzantine practice called domain tasting. Simply wait the five days, then surf on over to GoDaddy, or other reasonably priced registrars, and pick up the name after NetSol releases it. Problem is, you have to hope that no one else decides to buy it from NetSol in the meantime which, unfortunately, is possible.

What does the developer community think of NetSol’s latest breath taking display of customer care? You guessed it. People are using NetSol’s name registration system against them to make a statement. As of this writing, recently-searched domain names included www.networksolutionsislame.com. (And that’s one of the milder ones.)

Why don’t they simply lower their prices to be more competitive, you say? That is indeed a Great Mystery.

More information:

Network Solutions Stands by Name Policy

Domain Registrar Network Solutions Front Running On Whois Searches

Network Solutions Registers Evey Domain Name Checked

Network Solutions Responds to Front Running Accusations