Pemaquid Communications

The Maine Commission for Community Service works to get people involved in volunteer activities throughout the state. The Commission’s site, at MaineServiceCommission.gov, is the place where they report to the public and their stakeholders how effective they’ve been in achieving their goal.

Last week Pemaquid launched a new and improved site for the Commission. Our main objectives:

Create a more up-to-date, professional image. The creative available from MCCS was limited. It consisted of a logo created in house. We developed a hi-res version of the logo so they could use it in other materials, and then we created the layout and color palette around it.

Improved content management. The Commission stores literally hundreds of reports and publications on the site. They publish events, photo galleries, news releases, and they have a fairly unique way of posting information about goings-on, called Maine Volunteer Fare. That and other content is handled with a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, our home-cooked CMS.

Accessibility. As a state agency, the MCCS must adhere to the Maine’s Accessibility Policy, which sets fairly high standards for meeting the needs of the visually/physically impaired. As always, our intent was to ensure accessibility without compromising the elegance of the site’s design concept. We think we’ve done that.

There are a bunch of other goodies reflecting the latest techniques: the jQuery Cycle plug-in is used to rotate the home page “marquee slides”; and for the first time we used css_browser_selector.js as a means to serve up different styles depending on the browsers (we used it mainly to adjust the navigational font in IE (further reading on CSS browser selector, many thanks to Jen Ecker for dropping this into the codebase).

Executive Director Maryalice Crofton and Public Relations Representative Rochelle Runge are a joy to work with and Pemaquid will continue to assist the MCCS with ongoing content development and by providing hosting for the site (Pemaquid also hosts another Commission site, VolunteerMaine.org). We’re proud to support their mission of fostering community service activities and a spirit of volunteerism in Maine.

Spending a little quality time beefing up the long, neglected social presence of Pemaquid. Here’s a rundown:

Pemaquid Zone (FB)
Pemaquid Fan Page (FB)
Twitter: http://twitter.com/pemaquid

You can also find me tweeting at:
http://twitter.com/portlandhead

I think we do a pretty spiffy job cranking out sites, but are there other people practicing great Web design in Maine? Ayuh!

Would like to see more!

Let’s get a conversation started about Web design, Web sites and technology in Portland, Maine.

Tonight I somehow ended up watching Merlin Mann‘s presentation on his Inbox Zero email management system. It’s based on the Getting Things Done method of personal productivity.

The entire video, which has been around awhile, is great in and of itself, but the thing that I want to point out here is that, about 40 minutes in, Mann discusses the various GTD apps out and about and says the ones that don’t work so well are the ones that try to do too much and are loaded with features.

Once again – simple elegance FTW.

Editor’s note: This post is a little off-topic for a blog about Web design, but I’ve been wanting to comment on this for some time.

If you go online in 2009, it won’t take long at all before you bump into Google. There’s the omnipresent search engine, of course. Google has roughly 76% of all search traffic.

But that’s just the beginning, of course.

Want to track traffic to your Web site? There’s Google Analytics.

How about an online advertising campaign? Google AdSense.

Upload a video? YouTube is a Google property.

RSS feed reader? Google Reader.

A Start page? iGoogle

Read a map? Yep, they’ve got Maps.

Hang on…we’re just getting warmed up…

Email? Gmail.

Events? Google Calendar.

Spreadsheets and other documents in the cloud? Google Docs.

A mini-intranet for your small business? Google Sites or Google Apps (the latter brings Sites together with Gmail, Calendar and Docs).

Need a heavy-duty offline search tool? Use the Google Search Appliance to crunch through your document library.

Chat? They’ve got it covered.

But wait! There’s more…(you’re seeing where I’m going w/this?)…

Want to manage your money? Try Google Finance.

Health information? You can use Google Health.

Online purchases can be run through Google Checkout.

Everywhere you look, it’s Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google.

Most of these services are free. That’s great if you’re a consumer of information, though it takes the fun out of things if you’re a developer trying to convince a Client to pay you to build something for them.

And all you have to do to gain access to most of these free services is… sign up for an account. That same account can be used to access most if not all of these services.

And so, it’s not far-fetched at all to suppose that Google can glom all this data together to build a very detailed picture of your habits, indeed who you are. And that’s the Holy Grail for any advertising company.

Check out this excerpt from the TOS for Google Health:

I hereby authorize Google to share the health information contained in my Google Health profile(s) in its entirety…

Hmm. My Google Health profile?

Microsoft once had a primary role in our digital lives, but at least a copy of the software on our personal computers couldn’t report back to the mother ship. In 2009, more and more of our data resides “in the cloud” rather than our personal hard drive.

I use Google as much as the next guy – as I’ve shown here, it’s hard to avoid that. But every time I have a choice, I’m going to choose the service that ain’t Google.

The company credo “Don’t Be Evil” notwithstanding, civil libertarians ought to keep their eyes on benevolent Big Brother Google. There’s a lot of information sitting in one place.

Below is an example of a javascript that lets you easily sort columns in a table. It’s called sortable.js. It’s been around for awhile, but I thought it worth a mention.

At Pemaquid we use it for table sorting in our Content Manager (our home-grown but spunky little CMS). The nice thing about it is that it degrades gracefully. In other words, the table works just fine even if the javascript doesn’t.

More on the whole bit here.

Editor’s note: Yep, the table below is not the prettiest, and I can’t properly show code snippets at the moment. We’ll be upgrading to WP 2.7 shortly and will bang the CSS around a bit to give a cleaner display.

Editor’s note: this was originally published on the Portland Press Herald’s NXT blog as a guest post.

To begin a story about Web design in Portland, Maine, I’ll start in the Atlanta airport.

That was where, while I was waiting to board the connecting flight that was to take me to the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference, that I found myself standing next to Andy Clarke. He isn’t exactly a household name, but in the world of Web, Clarke – an expert on CSS and a member of the Web Standards Project – is a rock star (he even actually looks like a rock star, a cross between someone from the British Invasion and Austin Powers. He’s got style).

Clarke was on his way to be a speaker at SXSW. We struck up a conversation, and he inevitably asked where I hailed from.

Portland, Maine, I told him, was where I ran my little Web design outfit, Pemaquid Communications.

Clarke was polite, but shot me a look of surprise that seemed to say ‘Portland, Maine? They build Web sites in Portland, Maine? I thought you guys were all lobstermen and lumberjacks.’

But really, why wouldn’t you want to build Web sites from Portland? You’ve got great geography (the sea, the mountains, the lakes, the woods) and great meterology (it’s a four-season town, you don’t bake in the summer and I don’t mind the snow in the winter, though your mileage may vary on that score!). It’s a great indoor-outdoor town. Oh, and there are plenty of great coffee shops with free wi-fi.

In short, the scene here is very conducive to creative thinking!

In the wonderful world of Web, it’s pretty easy to set up shop anywhere, and collaborate with Clients and team members hither and yon. There’s Basecamp for project management, Adium and Skype for real-time collaboration, Facebook, LinkedIn and a little thing called Twitter for networking (I found out Justin was looking for guest bloggers via his tweet on the subject).

A decent foundation has been laid in Portland for a vibrant Web community. Joe Michaud built MaineToday.com from scratch into a cutting-edge hotspot for online journalism, winning awards against much larger media companies. MaineToday alumni have gone on to make an impact. Justin Davis’ group at Portland Web Works manages VisitMaine.com, the site of the Maine Office of Tourism and one of the best tourism sites in the country. Frank McMahon is now a successful photographer and podcaster whose products include the popular Rumor Girls. (Full disclosure: I’m also one of those alumni).

There are also pockets of creativity at the University of Southern Maine, if you know where to look, and the Maine College of Art is cranking out great graphic designers who now have a keen sense of digital media and who are making an impact. That’s just the tip of the iceberg – apologies for all the things I’m leaving out.

So what do we need to make Portland a hub for Web creatives? We need community. To build community, I think we need to do two things:

Strengthen the skills of the people who are already here. Local Web heads should do what they can to support improvements in the digital media programs at USM, MECA and Southern Maine Community College. We should also develop “continuing education” programs – think regular meetups, BarCamps and labs.

Attract the techies who aren’t here. Right now that’s a big challenge for P-town. Sure, we’ve got loads of fresh air and our fair share of culture. Heck, they say we’ve got more restaurants per capita than anyplace outside of San Fran – that ought to count for something! Even so, though top flight Webslingers can work from anywhere, but there’s still a desire to get together with like-minded individuals in meatspace, and right now Portland is rightly seen as a little isolated in that regard. So we need to “connect the dots” in terms of the folks who are already here (see previous paragraph) so we’ll be able to more noticeably display visible signs of Web life to those viewing Portland from afar.

Can we connect the dots and build a world-class Web community? I think we can. I see subtle signs that the cells are coming together. What do you think?