Pemaquid Communications

Wordpress 2.6 hit the streets Tuesday.

Download it

The Big Easy, located at 55 Market Street in the heart of Old Port, is Portland’s premier music venue. Club owner Ken Bell was looking for a hip new look that would give folks a great way to easily look up upcoming shows. More importantly, he wanted a way to easily self-publish photos, calendar listings and links.

So, we rocked until our fingers bled onto our mouses and created a new look that we hope makes you want to head downtown. Ken says feedback has been very complimentary so far - thanks everybody!

The site uses the Pemaquid Content Manager for self-publishing of content. Ken & Co. will also be using Pemaquid’s email service for enewsletters.

Your Rockstar Design Team are:

Walt Craven - Graphic Design, guitars (Walt is also the lead vocalist for local band Lost on Liftoff)

The Elusive Dr. Jecker (that’s Dr. Jennifer Ecker, Pixel Surgeon) - Web design, lead guitars, keyboard, harmonica, ukelele

Rob Landry - (yours truly) Interaction Design, Programming, bass, drums, vocals (yes, bass & drums at the same time)

Rock on!

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.

Common Good Ventures is a team of experienced business people applying their professional expertise, their networks and their passion for change to help strong nonprofits realize their potential to accomplish even more for Maine. It’s the kind of work that’s sometimes called venture philanthropy.

CGV came to Pemaquid looking to increase the level of interactivity on the site and find unique ways to enhance the non profit advisory services it provides so well offline.

The result is the Virtual Springboard, an online component to the 90-minute forums where each month a non-profit comes prepared to present a specific challenge to a group of business people and hear their “quick-hit” ideas.

Virtual Springboard allows Common Good Ventures to ‘extend the conversation’ surrounding each month’s forum, allowing panelists (folks who help advise) who aren’t able to participate in the physical space to do so online, as well as to more easily share the ideas generated at each session.

CGV staff are able to update the Virtual Springboards and many other parts of the site on demand, using the Pemaquid Content Manager, Pemaquid’s content management system.

Other features include a Photo Gallery that shows CGV staff and Springboard panelists at work (also handled through the Content Manager). It’s a great way for them to easily showcase what a Springboard - or “Volunteering your Mind” - looks like.

Common Good Ventures’ President, Kristin Majeska, says of the project:

Pemaquid has been wonderful to work with, providing us with many creative ideas.

Well, right back at cha, Kristin. It was wonderful to work with you, Diane Oberbeck, Neal Williamson and all at Common Good Ventures. You and your panelists certainly have many creative ideas of your own! We’re glad to be a part of your success.

A tip of the cap to the Dream Team: Jamie Peloquin (Design Concept), Jennifer Ecker (Web design) and Sarah Hines (Creative Services Coordinator - a.k.a. ‘Air Traffic Control’). You guys rock so loud my ears ring!

Sorry to bring up the subject of “snow” (but hey! we had flurries in Portland yesterday so I don’t feel too bad).

Pemaquid has launched a redesigned Web site for the Maine Snow and Ice Sculpting Foundation. They are best known for the frosty carvings we’ve seen in year’s past at the Maine Winterfest events in Falmouth.

In addition to a new look, MS&I wanted to be able to quickly and easily update content throughout the site. For that, we installed the Pemaquid Content Manager, our user-friendly content management system.

With it, Foundation personnel can update copy and create photo galleries as needed.

Keep an eye on this site for news about the Maine State Snow Sculpting Championship, taking place February 14-17, and stay tuned for the World’s Tallest Sandcastle.

Pemaquid Communications recently designed and relaunched a Web site for annie|catherine, a dynamic duo that produces designer stationery and related accesories from their studio in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook, Maine.

Their products include cards for most important occasions - birthdays, holidays, thank yous and other note cards - as well as calendars, picture frames, wrapping paper and prints of the amazing and colorful paintings of Catherine Breer (she’s the “catherine”).

Working with Catherine and her partner, Annie Darling - graphic artists every bit as talented as our own design team - made for an interesting project. Our challenge was to translate the very clear vision they had for the look of the site into something that would be pixel perfect across all browsers.

That’s why making sure the xHTML and CSS was valid was so important. That’s also why we used a “sIFR” (Flash image replacement) javascript to render the page titles in the specific font requested by the Client.

A custom version of our Pemaquid Commerce content management system for e-commerce allows annie|catherine to easily update product images, prices and descriptions, review and process orders and update other site content including Store Locations, Reps, News and Events. They can also create custom promotional pages.

Finally, we developed an easy-to-use e-newsletter manager that allows a|c to send email promotions at will using a simple yet elegant template Pemaquid designed for them.

If you’re looking for great looking designer stationery or fun holiday cards in advance of the holiday season (Gosh! Is it that time of year already?), you definitely ought to surf on over and have a look.

annie|catherine is graciously offering readers of this blog a 20% discount if they enter the promotional code “adcb” at checkout (good through October 31).

OK, so you’ve decided you want to add a blog to your Web site - a good move since. pound for pound, frequently-updated sites tend to grab higher search engine rankings than their peers who go without. So you download a copy of Wordpress, an open source blog platform that has all the features you’re looking for. Great.

Next, you want your blog to have the same look and feel - theme, if you will - as the rest of your Web site. Your designer cracks open the Wordpress blog in Dreamweaver and gasps at all the PHP code in the templating system. Skilled as she is with HTML, your designer can’t make heads or tails of the CSS or PHP.

Not to worry. Pemaquid has designed Wordpress blogs for a number of Clients. In fact, this blog you’re reading is a Wordpress blog (though an imperfect one - ever heard the one about the cobbler’s children who had no shoes?).

So if you’re looking to add a Wordpress blog (or Typepad blog, or any other flavor), contact us and we’ll get you set up. We’ll do it fast too (48 hour turnaround is doable), if necessary.

As with most things in life, when it comes to content management systems, you get what you pay for. There are a lot of open source solutions out there, including Joomla, Drupal and Plone (interestingly, all three of these Web sites are “dot-org”, not “dot-com”. Hmmm…) Many of these CMS’s are “free”. Just download and go.

Often, that’s when the fun begins.

A “free” CMS is something somebody else built without knowing anything about the people who will use your Web site. They say they are “customizable”, and, yes, they are right. My car is also customizable - if I can just get Ricky Craven’s pit crew to soup it up. You get the drift.

When seeking out a content management system for your Web site, it’s important first to make a list of all the things people will commonly do on your site (post news, events, jobs, upload photos, buy stuff) and make sure the CMS you select will do all of those things well. Most of the open source CMS’s will let you download a copy so you can kick the tires (sorry about the auto-racing pun, it was not intended).

When a Client signs on w/Pemaquid, we’ll go through this process w/you. Then, we can customize our own standard CMS, the Pemaquid Content Manager, as part of the overall design process.