Pemaquid Communications

As we Portlanders like to say, our town has more restaurants per capita than any city in the country except San Francisco. There is a corresponding density of that most enigmatic of Internet properties – the Really Bad Restaurant Web Site.

This was made painfully clear as I researched local eateries while preparing to entertain a guest from out of town. More often than not, I found myself served the standard fare – Flash intros (with the obligatory “skip intro” link and which don’t play on iPads or iPhones), graphics the size of an asteroid and which take more than 8 seconds to load, and menus buried so deeply I felt I had discovered buried treasure when they were finally found.

Why are restaurant Web sites so astonishingly awful?

After all, it’s 2011, not 1999. The rest of the Web has abandoned splash pages with videos that auto-play and menus encased on 40MB PDF files that must be downloaded to be read. Why do restaurants – even upscale eateries that should have the means to afford quality interaction design – seemingly exist on a Web That Time Forgot?

In a recent article on Slate, Farhad Manjoo attempts to answer the question. His conclusion: most sites are run by chefs in their 50′s who don’t spend much time in front of a computer. They are often abetted in their ignorance by Web designers who are only too glad to feed their desires for sound beds and Flash-y-ness.

But other industries have site owners that don’t get much screentime and yet long ago abandoned the worst design practices. There’s one other essential reason why restaurant sites haven’t evolved.

It has to do with usability.

Restaurants conduct no actual business on their Web sites. You can buy shirts, pants or even cars online, but to get Grilled Duck Steak with Gnocchi you still have to head over to someone’s dining room.

Because restaurant Web sites don’t (directly) ring the cash registers, most haven’t awakened to the need to make their sites easy to use. That’s a big mistake, because about a third of reservations are made during times when a restaurant is closed. Mobile traffic is growing, so making sure your site downloads information to those devices easily is critical to capturing an ever-growing percentage of site traffic.

To have a successful Web site, restaurant owners should do the following:

Make menus easy to access – Have a page in your navigation labeled “menu”, and make it a Web page, not a PDF or a graphic. Feature specials on the home page. Show prices.

Design for mobile – A simple, easy to download user interface for mobile will help capture people who are looking for a meal on the spur of the moment.

Make contact information easy to find – have your Web designer create a Google map showing the restaurant location, and feature your phone number and address prominently

Make use of social media – you *are* using Facebook and Twitter to promote your restaurant, aren’t you?

Eliminate the Flash – Flash can’t be read by the diner who’s kicking back with her iPad. Flash content can’t be accessed by search engines. Get rid of the splash pages; remember that there’s a reason why every one of them has a “skip intro” link. Save the pizzazz for the dining room.

It might seem strange to you, but I cringe whenever someone describes me or my team as “geeks”. The moniker makes me uncomfortable because I don’t think it promotes a healthy perspective on what we at Pemaquid do for our Clients.

To me, a geek, is a person who loves technology for its own sake. Someone who becomes enraptured by the thought of another great CSS3 (text-shadow FTW!) or HTML5 technique (Oh. Sweet. Modernizr!)

It can set up a certain elitist way of looking at the world. I’ve been privy to many a conversation where Web designers labeled themselves as geeks as a way of telling themselves that they and their pals knew something that the other mere mortals did not. If you’re not careful, you can become quite a snob (I’ll be honest: I’ve been there and back a few times), and that’s an unhealthy way to look at Clients and your community.

Don’t get me wrong. I think you have to love what you do, you should feel good about what makes you special, and you should be curious and fascinated by what you do for a living. But I think it’s more important to focus on how cutting edge technology can help solve problems for people and make the Web a less confusing, cluttered place.

So call us geeks if you like, but we won’t look at things that way. We’re really just people like you – your friendly neighborhood Web-slingers – who have a superpower or two that you might need when it comes to the Web.

Yesterday I spoke with someone at an organization to whom we gave a pitch presentation last week. He explained that we weren’t getting a gig to redesign his organization’s Web site. He said his committee told him one reason they weren’t inclined to give us their business because ‘we never asked for it’.

We don’t mind a bit. We will never ask for business.

Sound crazy? It’s not when you think about it. It’s actually become part of our screening process. Let me explain.

When speaking to potential Clients, it’s my job to demonstrate that we are the experts, that we have the know-how to give them the best Web site possible. We should be able to convince them that our approach and our process will lead to a site that is clearly superior to other options.

If we can’t do that, if the prospect doesn’t end up coveting our approach and our previous work, it means one of two things: we haven’t done our job demonstrating our capabilities, and/or they will end up being a Client who is not a good fit.

In a way, it’s like dating. You’ll form a healthy relationship with someone who likes you for who you are and not because you bought them diamond rings and took them for a ride in your Carrera.

Don’t get me wrong. For the prospect in question, we wrote up a proposal, we prepared and delivered a solid pitch presentation and, at the end we said (as we always do) that we were looking forward to the opportunity to work with this prospect (and we were very forthright in saying that).

But we wanted to work with them because we wanted to build a great Web site, not simply because they waived money under our noses. We won’t say anything or do anything just to get the work (we have plenty already). We’ll propose to do what we think is right – and prospects will either agree or they won’t.

For the health of our company, the Clients we want (and the ones you should want for your business) are the ones who want to work with you, not the other way around.

Today we’re reviewing a Client’s competitors’ online presence: their sites, content management systems (CMS) and social networks. We’ll compile the results of our digital survey and provide analysis as to strengths and weaknesses regarding a competitor’s online marketing communications, their code base, the accessibility of their sites and the technologies they use.

If you’d like some perspective as to how your business stacks up against the competition, just get in touch.

Our year as an inaugural entreverge award recipient officially concluded last week with the selection of new winners at the June 16 gala at Port City Music Hall. So now is a good time to reflect.

When you win an award like entreverge, naturally people often ask how the award changes your life and makes a difference in your business. One thing’s for sure – 2009 was a very tough year, but it would have been much tougher without entreverge.

Entreverge definitely helped build an awareness of Pemaquid, what we are all about, and our coworking experiment at Wycwah. The award’s endorsement has helped to solidify the support of the creative community here in Portland behind what we’re doing.

It’s been great to get some face time with entreverge advisors like former governor Angus King, IDEXX Founder David Shaw, Swardlick marketing group principal David Swardlick, the management consultants of the local ACE chapter, and many others (I was particularly pleased to see that long-time Client Gabrielle Melchionda of Mad Gab’s was among them).

Those connections forged will always be there, and who knows what opportunities they might lead to down the road, and the advisor’s perspective on business and what Pemaquid is doing has been helpful.

On the other hand, no magical secrets were revealed. No great bolts from the blue that have transformed the business. In that sense, it reaffirmed one of life’s basic truths: there’s no substitute for hard work, and when the lights dim and the cameras get turned elsewhere things still boil down to you, your own personal energy and your belief in yourself and what your doing.

Perhaps more exciting than meeting some high-powered advisors was the opportunity to meet and get to know my fellow 2009 entreverge winners. Karen Farrell of Top Line Marketing, Emilie Sommer of emilie inc., Adrianne Zahner of Turtle Love Committee and Jeremy Litchfield of Atayne are all doing amazing things, right here in Portland, Maine, and it’s been so great to get to know them and compare notes. I’m so glad that entreverge decided to select five winners each year instead of just one.

What’s next for Pemaquid? More and more of the same. Smart, bulletproof, common-sense Web design and development, delivered with style, by people who speak English (not geek) and don’t talk down to you, is needed more than ever.

We’re so glad to be doing it here in Portland, Maine, and we’re jazzed that our fair city has entreverge, a fantastic way to recognize, build awareness and support great business ideas and the spirit of entrepreneurship.

When it comes to 2009, one thing’s for sure – there was never a dull moment. In fact, it had more ups and downs than the SooperDooperLooper. I like excitement, but I’m hoping 2010 will be a year of steadier, more balanced growth.

The year started off with, shall we say, a “subdued” business climate. Then in January two long-time collaborators decided to go their own way and haven’t looked back. No calls, no emails, no coffee, no beer, no lunch. (I blame myself). For someone who went into business in part to try to build a better kind of workplace, that one still hurts bad. Real bad.

In February, with the commercial real estate market being what it was (at a low ebb, that is), it was time to head downtown and see if I could score some office space. I got very lucky and hit the jackpot with a top floor space at 28 Maple Street, formerly occupied by Lapchick Creative. I couldn’t rent the entire floor space, but worked out a deal w/our landlord, Portland Pie (Best. Landlord. Ever.) to rent part of it and then see if I could bring in like-minded creatives to fill it out as a coworking space.

I had heard about the idea of coworking, through Twitter of all places, and in April it became a trending topic in Portland, thanks in part to a great article in The Switch by Avery Yale Kamila. Then Space Gallery held a Jelly – a coworking open house of sorts – and we followed suit (we hosted Jellies on a monthly basis throughout most of 2009 and we intend to continue this year). Our space now has four full-time members, two part-time members and a funky name – Wycwah (you’ll have to ask a member how we came up with that one). You can follow Wycwah on Twitter, naturally.

In February, I decided to try a NoonHat lunch, organized by the folks at Portland Greendrinks. There, purely by chance, I ran into Sheila Reiser, a gal who was in-between jobs and to some extent was trying to find herself. Needing a Creative Services Coordinator, after the departure of an aforementioned collaborator, I decided to take a chance, and hired her.

Here’s the thing you need to understand about Sheila: she didn’t have a computer, a Facebook page or a Twitter account. Her mobile phone was an ancient model, and I don’t think she sent very many text messages outside of those we exchanged. Quite an unusual hire for a company that does Web design and development.

What Sheila did have, however, was a keen interest in typography and a can-do, supportive attitude. She was not in this game of life for the money (she had turned her back on her career as an officer in the Coast Guard – she graduated from the Academy), she actually wanted to help Pemaquid make a difference, and see if it was in any way fulfilling for her. She had a courteous, military bearing, but was not “professional”. Refreshing, just right for Pemaquid (courteous but not “professional”), and a very good fit as it turned out.

In March, I caught another break, bumping into Jordan Warren, while giving a presentation on e-commerce to her class at the University of Southern Maine. Jordan quickly became Pemaquid’s first summer intern, and the experience went so well that she has continued on as a part-time employee, and she’s doing a bang up job as my Humble Apprentice. When Sheila left in mid-December, Jordan assumed her role as Pemaquid’s new Creative Services Coordinator. You will be hearing much more about her soon enough.

In June, Pemaquid was nominated for one of the first-ever entreverge awards by a Client, Curtis Picard of the Maine Merchants Association. We were nominated for advancing the idea of coworking in Portland, and we were lucky enough to be one of five companies (out of 50+ nominees) to win. Winners have access to an Advisory Committee that includes former governor Angus King, Idexx founder David Shaw and David Swardlick of Swardlick Marketing Group. Happily, one of our Clients, Gabrielle Melchionda of Mad Gab’s is also an advisor. Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about my experience with entreverge advisors.

My entreverge has been wonderful, and has quite possibly saved my business. It’s mission – to celebrate and promote good, creative business ideas and innovation here in Maine – is something that should be supported year after year. Kudos to Johann Sabbath and the folks at Propel for bringing it to life.

I’ve met many wonderful folks through coworking, and many through social media connections. Portland has many wonderfully talented “digital creatives” and I’m hoping there will be many opportunities to collaborate in the coming year.

Like a lot of folks, I’m looking forward to a better 2010, but there’s definitely going to be a lot of very hard work to be done to be successful. The business of Web design continues to evolve, forcing those of us in the market to adapt quickly. The economy still isn’t exactly rainbows and unicorns like it was a few years ago, and competition for the best gigs will be tough.

But bring it on. I’m convinced you learn much more about what your business is made of during the tough times, because you’re forced to be more introspective about what you need to do to be successful.

CONTRACT WEB DEVELOPER

Pemaquid Communications seeks a Web developer to assist us with upcoming work on a project-by-project basis. Proficiency in Python and the Django framework is preferred, although expertise in Rails or PHP frameworks is also good. Experience architecting and building custom content management systems is desirable.

Please send a technical resume along with links to working Web sites we can review to:

work@pemaquid.com

Thanks for your help. Rock on….

Rob Landry
Founder/Principal/Chief Bottle Washer
Pemaquid Communications
W http://www.pemaquid.com
FB: http://www.facebook.com/pemaquid
T: http://twitter.com/pemaquid

I’m very excited to announce that we have a new coworking partner at the 28 Maple Street mashup.

Sarah Robbins is a Web designer who operates as Brightwork LLC. Currently Sarah is managing improvements to Yacht.com.

Her faithful companion is Alibi the besenji. They’ve both settled right in and are a great fit with the rest of us mad hatters.

You can meet Sarah and Alibi at the coworking Jelly we’re hosting tomorrow.

Follow Sarah on Twitter: twitter.com/brightworkllc

Pemaquid Communications has been nominated for an entreverge award for our work pioneering and promoting the concept of coworking here in Portland this spring.

It certainly is nice to be recognized. What began simply as a search for office space evolved after a conversation with Chris Messina, founder of the original coworking space – San Francisco’s Citizen Space – and now seems to have captured the imagination of many Digital Creatives in town.

We got some media love from The Maine Switch, we had a successful and well-attended social last month, the coworking social Jelly has come to town, and now there are two Facebook groups on coworking here: Portland Coworking and Portland (Blueberry) Jelly.

Best of all, there are now four of us (five if you count Jordan, Pemaquid’s intern) at our little coworking space at 28 Maple Street.

Entreverge is an organization formed recently to promote entrepreneurs and business innovators in Maine.

Five award winners will be selected from the nominees at a party at Port City Music Hall this Thursday evening.

Pemaquid recently launched a brand new Web site for Eastern Book Company, a firm located in Westbrook, Maine that provides book acquisition services to libraries worldwide. Librarians place thousands of orders through the site each month.

EBC, run by brothers Dick and Steve Coyne, had decided that the time was right for a makeover. We had a few major objectives.

The Goals

Present a more professional image. Though the EBC Web site was fully functional and getting the job done, Dick Coyne wanted a polished look and feel that would present a first class image to customers (and more importantly, potential customers). The look developed by Pemaquid tied in with a rebranding developed by a local marketing firm and amplified it.

Improve the user experience. EBC strives to provide the best customer service in the book acquisitions industry. Pemaquid provided better views into the status of orders, book claims and especially book searching and sorting.

Content Management. We plugged in a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager to allow EBC to self-publish content to the home page and to create booklists and publish news.

Custom RSS feeds. EBC wanted to create custom RSS feeds for their booklists that would allow customers to easily get updates, via a feedreader, of booklist topics of interest to them.

The Technology

Yahoo User Interface. We used “YUI”, as it’s known, to provide AJAX sorting of book search results and shopping cart data. This reduced overhead as fewer calls to the server were needed for customers to navigate recordsets.

Ingres database. EBC maintains millions of book titles in Ingres (the-Open-Source-database-that’s-not-mySQL). We had to tie into that existing system, which we did using PHP.

mySQL database. The Pemaquid Content Manager was built for mySQL; any information not related to book ordering runs through this database.

The Team

In order of appearance…

Jamie Peloquin, Web Designer – Jamie took the EBC brand and created the look and feel.

Jen Ecker, Web Designer (Pixel Surgeon) – Jen was the one primarily responsible for taking Jamie’s design comps and turning them into XHTML and CSS. She added a dash of iconography along the way as well.

Sarah Hines, Web Design/Air Traffic Control – Sarah chipped in with project management and a little HTML coding here and there.

Jeff Norris, Web Developer – Jeff was the one who deciphered Ingres (this was our first Ingres project) and wired in the YUI grids and PHP scripting to talk to it.

Robert Brochu, Graphic Designer – Robert created a few graphics to add the finishing touches to booklistings towards the end of the project.

Rob Landry (Yours Truly), Chief Bottle Washer, Cat Shepherd – I did the business requirements analysis, information architecture, and installed the customized Pemaquid Content Manager and chipped in on the XHTML/CSS, as I usually do. Since it’s my business, I also get to do a lot of project management too (don’t envy me all at once, now).

The Future

The response from EBC customers on the new site has been overwhelmingly positive. I say: Good Start.

We’re currently developing an online marketing plan for Eastern Book which will include Twitter and possibly other social networks where appropriate, and we’re continuing to refine the the user experience based on customer feedback.

There’s a lot of twittering going on about social media lately (pun intended). I’m going to be weighing in on the subject April 7 with a presentation I’ll be giving at the Harrasekett Inn, co-sponsored by the Freeport Merchants Association and the Maine Merchants Association.

Here are the particulars:

We’ll talk about a few Web sites you may have heard of – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube – as well as a few others, with an eye towards harnessing them to develop a sensible strategy for extending your organization’s brand or mission online.

Why me?

Good question indeed. I’ve built my business not on social media, but on the smart Web site design, usability, accessibility and content management, and that’s what I do best.

On the other hand, I also feel passionately about taking a no-nonsense approach to whatever it is you’re doing online, and that includes social media. I also know as much about social stuff as anyone in Maine.

I first bumped into Twitter in March 2007 while attending the South by Southwest interactive conference in Austin, Texas (which I call the Superbowl of Web Design). I twitter up a storm as @portlandhead and maintain @pemaquid (for the biz) and @Bluezberry_Jam (for my band; I play bass in my “spare time”).

I’m also the first (and to my knowledge, still the only) Maine Web designer to have developed Facebook apps. Pemaquid has done four: Bluezberry Jam, Portland Diner, Jenny’s Cards and Lost on Liftoff.

Editor’s note, 3/28/09: since creating this post, I’ve learned of another Mainer who’s created Facebook apps.

Fun Facts

Here are a couple fun facts about social media, to help you understand why it’s so important to use them effectively:

• 5 of the 10 most popular Web sites are social networks
• 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day
• 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

All that and more coming up April 7. See you there!

In the meantime, there’s a comment box below. You can use it. So give me your questions. What would you like to learn?

Remember a couple of weeks ago when an office building in Yarmouth was totally destroyed by fire? It left a couple dozen business people without a ‘place of business’; my hairstylist Wanda, who works at Top Cuts, was one of them.

Coincidentally, I got my hair trimmed the day before the fire. Talk about cutting it close (pun intended).

The day after the fire, Wanda called me and asked me to tell her the date of my next cut (it was Feb. 6, this past Friday). Her appointment calendar had gone up in smoke along with everything else in the fire, and she (and all the other stylists) had lost all their records.

I solved her problem by telling her about Google Calendar (take a tour). With “gCal”, keeping appointments up-to-date is a snap, and since they’re online (out there ‘on the cloud’, as it were) they’re safe from nuclear attack as well as fire (that was the original idea behind the Internet, you’ll recall).

Google Calendar lets you easily reset appointments without crossing things out or smudging erasures, as with a physical datebook. You can do things a datebook made out of dead trees can’t, like email an appointment confirmation or automatically send a reminder by email or text message the day before.

A Google Calendar for a business like a salon can be kept private, and if there are multiple stylists involved, each can have her own schedule that’s color-coded.

When I got my ears lowered again this Friday I followed up with Wanda (Top Cuts is temporarily sharing space with Studio 88, another Yarmouth salon) and she likes the idea. First thing’s first, though – they need to get a computer and wireless Internet access before they can put Google Calendar to work. Stay tuned…

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.

Editor’s note: I originally wrote this piece last week for the Portland Press Herald’s NXT blog.

Nothing is going to come easy for Portland’s digital creatives in 2009. Every day will have to count. Here are my suggestions (resolutions, if you will) for making it in the coming year:

Keep your overhead low – this is not the time to fritter away your cash flow on things you don’t need. Daily $3 lattes are out (I know, this will be hard) and learn to love rice and beans – you’ll be glad you did (and you’ll be healthy).

Offer something of value - to get noticed you have to provide something worthy of consideration. Seems simple enough, but remember, people have to understand the value of the service you’re offering them. It has to be crystal clear.

Be a Problem Solver – Find a need and fulfill it. Be relevant. In 2009, don’t do something “just because”. Those who succeed will find ways to make themselves useful to clients.

Refine your elevator pitch – who you are and what you do – and how that’s better – should roll right off your tongue, in two sentences or less. And it should strike a chord.

Build up your base – The best place to look for business in 2009 is towards your existing clients. You understand their needs, and they trust you. Offer useful suggestions to help them get through a tough year, and they’ll help you.

Keep it real – Sock puppets didn’t cut it in 2000 (we realized there’s no “New Economy” – just an Economy), and idle Twittering won’t get the job done nearly a decade later. Provide a real, sustainable service. Keep the buzzwords out of your lexicon; they are a smokescreen used by those who don’t know what they are talking about.

Ride the wave – On the other hand, find out all you can about the latest trends (we’re back to Twitter here) and try to understand how your business, and your clients, can benefit from them. In the last few years we’ve seen a succession of new digital media: blogs, online video and social networks. Prediction for 2009: keep an eye on Google’s Android open source operating system for mobile devices.

Challenge conventional wisdom – If most people are zigging, and you see that zagging makes more sense – do it! Don’t be afraid to be controversial and talk it to a different perspective, if you believe strongly. If you’re right, people will eventually come around, and by then you’ll own the idea.

Be in it for the long haul – Have a plan and work your plan, day in and day out. Be consistent. Suit up to play ball every day. There are no overnight success stories – only tales of hard work and lots of midnight oil.

Be undeniably good – This is Steve Martin’s advice to anyone who wants to make it in any field. Be so good you can’t be ignored. That takes hard work.

It’s year-end, the time of year when I clean out the file cabinet (the price of paper will go down once my contribution gets recycled into the supply chain).

I have a file for quotes, aphorisms, and other sayings that I like to pull out from time to time to help me stay focused on what really matters. I came across L.L. Bean’s Golden Rule for creating a successful business. I deemed it worthy of a post. So, for your consideration:

L.L. Bean’s Golden Rule

“Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more.”

What is a Customer?

• A customer is the most important person ever in this company – in person or by mail.
• A customer is not dependent on us; we are dependent on him.
• A customer is not an interruption of our work; he is the purpose of it.
• We are not doing a favor by serving him; he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
• A customer is not someone to match wits with. Nobody ever won an argument with a customer.
• A customer is a person who brings us his wants. It is our job to handle them profitably to him and to ourselves.

I’ve been trying to catch up on last week’s Pop!Tech 2008 conference in Camden, Maine and came across this podcast of a lecture by Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic.

It has nothing to do with Web design, but I found it very inspirational.

Zander convincingly demonstrates that success is largely a function of our attitude. He tells of two shoe salesmen sent to Africa. The first phones the home office “Situation hopeless! No one here has heard of shoes!”. The second calls and says “Wonderful news! No one here has shoes – yet!”

One looks at limits, the other possibilities.

So very apropos for Pemaquid right now, where we are taking stock to figure out how we’ll measure success having reached our current level of achievement.

So remember, don’t focus on how inadequately talented you may feel, or how much there is to do; focus on how your talents have made a difference for others and you’ll find the fuel to do more great things.

A little over a week ago the Pemaquid team launched a new site for Oakhurst Dairy, a venerable Maine company expertly run by Stan Bennett and his family for three generations. The Oakhurst brand stands for high quality, and so we wanted to make sure that Maine’s largest dairy had a Web presence that measured up.

Most importantly, Oakhurst was looking for a better content management system that would give Marketing Director Jim Lesser and his staff more flexibility to quickly and easily update many different types of content throughout the site. We responded by building a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, adding special modules for handling Products, “marquee spots” on the home page (“Nature’s Perfect Food”, etc.) and features on student Athletes of the Week.

Other modules were tailored to Oakhurst’s content needs, and the flexibility of the Content Manager allowed us to easily adjust the presentation of many different types of content, such as the company timeline.

In terms of design, we were able to have some fun with Oakhurst’s wonderful signature “landscape” graphic, a pastoral scene depicting the Maine countryside. We used some advanced CSS to nail the landscape to the bottom of the viewspace in front of a division containing the other content for the page. As a nifty little trick, when you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see the sun rise (unless you’re viewing in Internet Explorer 6; unfortunately, IE6 doesn’t support the display of transparent PNG graphics used in the landscape overlay. We used some conditional CSS to detect IE6 and serve up a different version of the scene for that browser).

The landscape graphic is quite a bit larger than we’d have liked (about 538k), but should perform fine for a wide majority of screen resolutions and connection speeds, according to site traffic statistics. And we’re continuing to tweak.

Other unique features include the interactive Products display (fortified with CSS, jQuery and AJAX), and an interactive Job application module that works like an e-commerce checkout and allows job seekers to save a profile they can use to quickly apply for future positions.

All in all, we hope the site is a good example of the wholesome natural goodness of Maine Web design.

We have to tip our caps to CIO Paul Connelly, who runs a well-oiled machine, and especially to Tim Hundt, our contact for project management. Tim kept everything very well organized from start to finish. Oakhurst’s IT staff kept us on our toes and challenged us to do our best work.

…but this is a true story. I swear on a stack of Facebooks.

The other day, Sarah Hines, Our Creative Services Coordinator, after much prodding, linked to me. No big deal, right? Well, when browsing her contacts I came across Glenn Skutt. Glenn is someone I used to know more than a decade ago when I worked at Virginia Tech. His wife and mine were in the local community band together; that was the (very slender) thread that linked us.

I linked to Glenn, telling him I was now in Maine and was building Web sites with Sarah. He replied saying he went to school w/Sarah’s mother, and was starting a new startup company called VPT Energy Systems which, by the way, needed a new Web site. Kudos, to you, LinkedIn, I guess your system really works!

But wait, this is where it starts to get really weird.

Glenn mentioned that his partner, Jack Lesko, was vacationing in Maine that very day. To make a long story short, we found out he was old college buddies with the neighbor RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET!!

Sarah and I rushed over to the neighbor’s and asked for the guy from Virginia Tech. I thought they were going to choke on their coffee.

A truly amazing day, a truly small world, and a truly unbelievable set of coincidences. Timing is everything, but this is incredible.

Sincerely,

Rob Landry
Pemaquid Communications, LLC

p.s. Yes, we’ve launched a modest new site for VPT Energy Systems – more on that soon.

The other day an acquaintance asked how he might use Facebook to help market a new book he’d written.

Tread lightly, my friend.

Using Faceook for “blatant self-promotion” can easily backfire. It’s like going to a casual cookout and talking business (too much might not be appreciated). On the other hand, your FB friends are presumably interested in what you are doing and can help spread the word about your endeavors quickly and well.

So go ahead and use Facebook, just be smart and polite about it. Here are my quick recommendations:

• Create a “page” for your book; invite friends to become “fans”.
• Create a FB group; invite people to join your group.
• Once you’ve done both, and/or created another Web page on the subject, post a FB “link”, w/a comment on it.

Don’t be pushy or over the top – just say “I’m doing something, thought you might like to know…”

Last night I noticed John Resig twittering about a new Web browser from Google, called Chrome. It’s hitting the news in other places; here’s a piece from yesterday’s New York Times.

Reports say Google intends to release the browser for download from its site today at: google.com/chrome but so far nothing’s available.

I haven’t had time to immerse myself the details yet, but here are some of the important details:

• It will be open source
• It will offer a way for people to see how Web sites are consuming system resources
• It will handle tabbed browsing in a slightly different way

This could have a major impact on both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser as well as the Mozilla Project’s Firefox.

You can find out more about the Google Chrome features at Google Blogscoped, a blog which follows the company; learn more about some of the technical implications of Google Chrome from John Resig on his blog.

As far as the impact on front end Web designers? It remains to be seen, but if you assume that Chrome adheres to Web standards and standard CSS implementations, it shouldn’t change the game all that much. Stay tuned….