Pemaquid Communications

I spent the day the other day working at the Space Gallery in Portland with other people who work from home more often than anything else. It was an event called “Jelly”. Jelly was originally started in NYC in 2006 by two roommates and has expanded from there. You can find more information at http://workatjelly.com/.

Everyone I talked to was really excited about getting out of the house and it was definitely a good opportunity to meet people and network. There is also talk of holding this event once a month somewhere in Portland (There’s actually one scheduled for July 7). You can keep up happenings via its Facebook group: Portland (Blueberry) Jelly.

I think this is a great idea to help people brainstorm, get refocused, and be very productive.

One other new project I have gotten to work on lately is site mapping. I am using writemaps.com which can be made public so more than one person can edit it. It reminded me a little of building a family tree, only it functions much better than most of those I have tried. It is very easy to show how the pages drill down.

This project, however, gave me a much larger respect for everything that has to go into a website. This site map was for a bank so it was more complex than some of the other sites we come across but any business is going to have many many pages and subpages. It’s something you don’t really appreciate, and therefore don’t appreciate the work that goes into building them, until you look at each and every one.

When designing all these way-cool, bubblicious Web 2.0 apps, and when working with frameworks like jQuery, it’s easy to get caught up in the ajax-y goodness of it all and forget about accessibility requirements.

One reason many Web sites don’t have a higher degree of accessibility built in is that accessible design is seen as hard work. It’s one more set of best practices to wrap one’s brain around.

Often, for designers, it can seem to take the fun out of things (though it doesn’t have to be that way).

Drew McClellan has a recent blog post on the subject that illustrates the point. He talks about the Cappucino framework, developed by 280 North and billed as a way to build “desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser”. The 280 guys are even working on a drop-and-drop IDE, called Atlas, for creating Cappucino apps.

I haven’t tried Cappucino first hand, but the word on the street is that this system is incredibly stunning, and the folks at 280 North should be congratulated for the accomplishment.

Cappucino’s javascript-laden framework, however, still has a ways to go to address accessibility issues. Hopefully, the 280 guys – and others developing similar systems – will take the time and do the hard work necessary to make sure their creations have a high degree of accessibility built in.

We can do it without losing the Coolness Factor. Focus on simple elegance in your design, make it your business to understand best practices for accessible design, and you’ll be able to build sites that work with assistive devices and are also fun to use.

Last night I released a new Facebook app for my band, Bluezberry Jam.

It’s a nifty little jukebox of sorts. You can play original songs from our upcoming album and add your favorite to a box on your Facebook profile, where your friends can play your fav, click back to the app, listen to our tunes, add it to their profile, where their friends can see it…

Devious, isn’t it?

It’s very similar to an app we launched last year for another local band, Lost on Liftoff. These are great little street-level tools for building buzz around an album launch.

Pemaquid also hosts both BluezberryJam.com and LostOnLiftoff.com, and both bands use the Pemaquid Content Manager to self-publish site updates.