Pemaquid Communications

Just read an article today on how people go about finding the best deals on travel sites. One self-proclaimed road warrior says he starts with Orbitz.com, because he “likes the layout”. He’ll move on to Expedia or Travelocity if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, but its interesting to note that he starts on a particular site because of how it looks and how the information is presented.

All things being equal, good design is a key differentiator that will help your site stand out from the crowd. It shouldn’t be given short shrift.

Way back at the dawn of time – you know, 1998 – people gave lip service to something called the “New Economy”. Middlemen, it was forecast, would soon be “disintermediated” out of financial transactions as “commerce” became “e-commerce”.

Then the bubble popped, sock-puppet mascots became extinct, real estate companies continued to prosper, and everyone generally took their eyes off the business transformations underway. Recently, however, I was taking stock, and things are definitely changing, though perhaps in slow-mo. Let’s recap:

Encyclopedia salesmen? Gone. Wikipedia and Google rule. ‘Nuf said.

Newspapers? On life support. Readership is down sharply as consumers gain more comprehensive and convenient access to information online. Start writing the epitaph.

Record companies? Current business model is dying. When the cost of reproducing your product falls to zero, it’s hard to make money on album sales.

Real Estate agents? Their days are numbered. Their monopoly over home listings through the MLS Listing service, their key advantage – will end; it’s a matter of time (see Zillow).

You could even say that employers have less control over their employees – especially those who are tech-savvy. Workers who are wise in the ways of the Web can use their online connections to cobble together a decent living by utilizing their social network.

Last, but certainly not least, here’s the kicker I’ve been building up to: software. We’re all familiar with Open Source software these days. The idea is that when you open up your source code to a vast online array of collaborators – when you loosen control – you get better apps.

It seems to me we’re moving towards an Open Source World. As traditional business categories yield to the Information Age, it seems like people will get better information, more conveniently, and at a lower cost. That seems like a good thing to me.

It also seems inevitable.

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/appleaday/blog/2008/08/best_buy_deal_to_sell_iphone_b.html

And you probably won’t have to wait 10-14 business days to get them…

Cuil is a new search engine that launched today and that claims to have a search index that’s larger than Google’s (120 million pages for Cuil vs. 40 million for Google). It also sports a magazine-style interface, w/its results laid out as blocks of text in a two or three-column layout.

It segments the results in navigable categories laid out across the top of the page as well as an Ajax-y category box in the right-hand column.

I kicked the tires on Google’s new competitor this morning and Cuil has a ways to go if it wants to supplant the King of Search. To succeed, you have to be relevant, and in that regard, Cuil has a little work ahead.

For example, a search for Pemaquid Communications returned this Web site (what else?) as the first result on Google, but was listed 7th (or 6th? it’s hard to tell w/t/layout) on Cuil. Granted, they’re brand new, whereas Google has had 10 years to perfect their search algorithm.

Search results for Pemaquid Communications:
Cuil
Google

Google also pulls in more results than Cuil, at least for now (1.4 billion vs. 1.3 billion for “car” being just one example).

More importantly, as someone who deals in Web site usability, one interesting thing to watch is whether Cuil’s layout will be a limiting factor in its success. I say this for two reasons:

First, the blocks of text are harder to compare than are Google’s simple, compact line item listings (Then again, maybe the categorization features will help bring more relevant results to the top of the search).

Second, it may be difficult to build in advertiser results that will generate enough click-throughs. They could put them in the third column, I suppose, or – purely a guess – add them as a category in the results navigation bar (but I’m guessing people might not bother to click over to that tab).

Time will tell. In the meantime, it’s good for Google to have a little healthy competition.

Ah, yes! The moment you’ve all been waiting for – iPhone 3G is hitting the streets Friday. For me, it’s about time to get one. The other day it finally happened – a potential customer said to me: “My Web site doesn’t look quite right on my iPhone”.

Time to experience the ins and outs first hand.

Mobile and location-based computing is becoming ever more popular, and with Apple’s App Store throwing open its doors this morning I’m sure we’ll see an explosion of creativity as third-party developers rush to build cool applications for iPhone users.

On the other hand, those of us in Portland, Maine have to remember not to get too worked up about 3G – because we won’t have it. AT&T’s 3G network doesn’t extend into our neck of the woods (AT&T coverage map). The new iPhone also supposedly drinks battery juice more quickly.

Still, at half the price of the original iPhone ($199 vs. $399), and with all the possibilities for mobile application development, it’s time to dive into the pool.

More than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in a 24-hour period, setting a world record, and more than 28 million download have taken place since the browser was released June 17.

BBC News »

Bumped into a link today that provided good food for thought: It’s about the Not-just-for-profit Company.

Sure, money is the oxygen of business, but even more importantly, you have to be working to create a life worth living – both for yourself, your employees and your Clients.

As we grow, I want to make sure Pemaquid is about generating great ideas. If we do that, I’m sure the money (at least enough of it to live off of) will take care of itself.

Last weekend marked a milestone for those of us involved in the online world here in Maine. Joe Michaud, who had led MaineToday.com for the last dozen years, stepped down at the end of April, and many MaineToday “alumni” were on hand at Ri Ra last Friday to wish Joe well (Ellen Kanner, an old co-worker who now is a Web designer at Dartmouth, even came down from Hanover).

Folks who spent time working under Joe’s leadership have gone on to form successful, influential Web businesses in the area: Franklin McMahon (former MaineToday.com Creative Services Manager) now has a well-known photography and podcasting company; Justin Davis now heads Portland Web Works, a Pemaquid competitor whose Clients include the Maine Office of Tourism; and (because I like to enumerate things like this in groups of three) I’ll throw myself in there as well.

Way back in the mid ’90′s, when we barely knew what a “browser” was, Joe and a small team at the Portland Press Herald created a skunkworks to try to figure out this “Internet thing”. What developed was a series of Web sites that coalesced to form MaineToday.com. Under Joe’s leadership, MaineToday won many awards, often against larger competitors, and became known as a standard-setting creative force in the mostly bland world of online newspaper publishing.

We were always testing boundaries. I remember covering the 2000 election from the studios of our television partner, WMTW. My job was to post up-to-the-minute blurbs to the MaineToday site about the local, regional and national returns coming in that night. It was pretty radical for a newspaper to have someone publishing on the spot with very little editorial oversight. We didn’t call it blogging back then, but that’s exactly what we were doing.

Now Joe is hanging out a shingle as a consultant to said newspaper industry – and they really need to hear from someone like him. Newspaper ad revenue continues to erode, and those dollars are not migrating to publishers’ digital facsimiles of the printed word. Newspapers’ core revenue centers have continued to lose out to online competitors like Craig’s List (want ads), Cars.com (automotive ads) and Zillow (real estate ads).

My take is that it won’t be long before the creative destruction precipitated by the Internet drives newspapers to the same fate as encyclopedia salesmen. However, if there’s anyone who can help smart publishers figure out how to best take advantage of their remaining assets – strong brands, relatively large audiences and strong advertiser relationships – it’s Joe Michaud.

Would you ever call an apparel retailer like L.L. Bean and ask for a pizza? Even if you did, would you expect them to assist you? Well, that’s just what a customer service rep at Zappos.com did, according to company CEO Tony Hsieh, who led a discussion on Top Ten Lessons Learned in e-commerce at SXSW Interactive.

Hsieh recounted the time when (at a different) conference, someone couldn’t get a late night pizza from room service, he jokingly suggested they ring his call center. Zappos, he said, focuses its branding on providing superlative customer service. The rep came through, providing the names of 5 pizza joints in the vicinity of the hotel.

Zappos sells apparel (primarily shoes) but Hsieh said that delivering exceptionally great customer service is key to their branding strategy – and their success. He said it may be more expensive to do that – Zappos provides free shipping and staffs its call center so that the average hold time is only 15 seconds – but its viewed as an investment, not an expense.

Hsieh says that important because when it comes to e-commerce, customer loyalty, repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals are very important to developing a successful business.

Here’s Hsieh’s Top Ten Lessons Learned in e-commerce:

1. e-commerce is built on repeat customers
2. word-of-mouth really works online
3. don’t compete on price
4. make sure Web site inventory is 10% accurate
5. centrally locate your distribution
6. customer service is an investment, not an expense
7. start small, stay focused
8. don’t be secretive; don’t worry about competitors
9. actively manage your company culture
10. be wary of so-called “experts”

Here’s a link to Hsieh’s presentation.

Here I am at SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas. If they nuked this town right now, they’d eliminate the talent behind the world’s most popular and innovative sites and set back Web development ten years – as well as perhaps 80% of the world’s MacBook Pro users.

I’m glad to be here for the second year in a row. I’m not so glad my bags are not…

Gettin’ on a Big Ol’ Jet Airliner later today to head to the biggest, baddest scrum of Web-slinging early-adopters the world has ever seen.

Yep, SXSW Interactive ’08.

Two years ago, there was blogging. Last year, online video. This year it’s… (you guessed it)… All Things Social.

I’ll be reporting live.

Wow, that didn’t take long! A few days after we posted a message about how only certain folks could post their thoughts – or job postings – on MaineBusiness.com, the MaineToday.com property has retooled and opened things up so that anyone can set up their blogging shop.

Do we already wield that much clout in this town?!?

Nah, the changes were planned. We talked to Carl Natale, MaineBusiness’ Chief Information Innovator (he says he’s not an “editor” or “content developer”) last week. Anyway, it’s nice to see that we can post our own job openings on the site if we like.

Yep, we set up a MaineBusiness blog. Right now I’m looking for a catchy name. Comment if you have any ideas.

The other day I surfed over to the blog on Internet marketing written by Rich Brooks, President of Flyte New Media, and bumped into this job posting.

Interesting read – if you’re a job-seeker, that is. The rest of the business community would find it hard to glean anything useful.

It didn’t take long to find another job posting. During the same week.

Huh? I thought this was supposed to be about Internet marketing.

Funny, I’ve never read Bill Nemitz’ column in the Press Herald and found that he was on the lookout for copywriters. A column like that would never make the light of day.

Things are different at MaineBusiness.com, a title run by MaineToday.com and Blethen Maine Newspapers, according to Carl Natale, the editorial staffer who manages the site’s bloggers. I’ve spoken to Carl and he said he found nothing inappropriate with the post.

I beg to disagree. Shameless self-promotion that doesn’t add value to a site’s core readership should be out of bounds.

I was Carl’s predecessor at MaineBusiness.com, and when I ran the show, I was careful to instruct our columnists (this was back before anyone was a “blogger”) not to use their space to directly promote their business.

MaineBusiness.com’s stock in trade is its credibility. Without it, it’s just another Blogger.com (and I’d hate to see that happen).

Speaking of Blogger.com, Carl says that by the end of the month MaineBusiness.com will be rolling out a new set of blogging tools that will allow anyone to hang a shingle and roll their own blog on the site. If anyone can set up a blog about anything, that’s one way to diffuse the issue. We’ll look forward to that.

Cardiovascular Consultants of Maine provides state of the art heart care to patients throughout the region. Based in Scarborough and with facilities in Augusta, Waterville, Sanford and Farmington, their goal is to be known as the preeminent full-service cardiology group serving Northern New England.

They approached Pemaquid recently with a story that’s not uncommon: a staff member had set up their site several years ago, but things had evolved to the point where it was difficult to manage the information quickly and in an organized fashion.

Problem solved. Pemaquid created a design that, among other things, features an online resource library on heart health, heart disease prevention and the meaning of cardiovascular terms (think “Cardiomyopathy”, “Coumadin” or “ACE inhibitors”) that are important to people undergoing cardiac care.

Pemaquid provides ongoing content updates for CCM, as well as Web hosting services, and as with all our Clients, we focus on speed as well as design execution. April Donovan, Cardiovascular Consultants’ CEO, says we’re hitting our marks:

I find Rob Landry and his staff to be responsive, professional and reliable. They listen to our needs and offer innovative solutions through great design and quick delivery.

It’s been a pleasure working with April, Elise Plummer, Samantha Smith and all at Cardiovascular Consultants of Maine, and we look forward to working with them for a long time to come!

Firefox fans will be interested to know that version three of their favorite surfboard for the Web just went Beta yesterday. However, unless your inner geek can’t resist, you might want to hold of on downloading it for a bit. V3 lacks a number of important plug-ins, and it sometimes doesn’t render sites as it should (that’s why there’s a beta period, right?).

The word on the street is that Firefox 3 has solved most issues related to memory leaks and security – already very good – is new and improved.

Firefox is now used by roughly 20% of Internet users.

Firefox 3 download page & release notes »

Wednesday I was the guest lecturer at an e-business class at the University of Southern Maine. The students will be working with us on Extreme Makeover – Web Site Edition.

I’m happy to report that no fruit was thrown, and no snores were heard.

In fact I heard a lot of great questions (“Are there any types of projects you wouldn’t take on?” Answer: yes, but not many. That’s for another post.)

One question was inevitable, I suppose: “How do you make money building Web sites in Portland, Maine?” (Remember, this is a business class.)

After being in the Web design business for more than five years, here’s my answer. It might sound corny or trite, but it’s worked for me.

Identify a problem and then solve it. Over and over. Better and better. I started as a mild-mannered (OK, maybe not so much) HTML coder, then one day a Client asked whether I could help them create a content management system. I realized that interactive programming and databases were involved, so I developed the skills to meet that need. Over time Pemaquid has developed Web hosting, e-commerce and search engine marketing services to meet other needs we’re asked about all the time.

Focus on building relationships. Take good care of people, treat them the way you want to be treated and they will take care of you and they will come back to you again and again (See? I told you it was going to sound trite). A significant percentage of our new work comes to us through existing Clients. When someone says to a business contact “You should work with XYZ Web design”, giving you that third-party endorsement, it’s much more powerful and persuasive than just about any other sales pitch you can whip up.

Do those two things, be creative and always on the lookout for new trends in your industry, and the money (knocking hard on wood here) will usually take care of itself.

Reading through the tea leaves here is not that tough. Microsoft is offering a 60% premium over Yahoo’s recent stock price b/c it realizes that apps (email, spreadsheets, document-creation, etc.) is migrating from the desktop to a new home on the ‘Net.

Case in point: I work w/several young guns who:

• Use Google Talk for IM
• Use Google spreadsheets
• Use Gmail

They think “Why should I fork over my hard-earned moola for MS Office when I can get it online for free?”

Then there’s Google AdWords, Google Analytics; oh, and Google also has this really cool search engine thingy.

Google here, Google there, Google, Google everywhere…

It’s definitely a threat to Microsoft’s facetime w/computer users.

What does a combined Microshoo mean for business marketing online? Probably a new ad network, combined MSN-Yahoo! search engine. Something that looks a lot like… Google.

Stay tuned…

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.