Open House/Social

May 19th 5:30 – 8:30pm – Free pizza, beer and wine provided by Portland Pie (our landlords; they run their business out of the ground-floor space. We’re up on the top – 3rd – floor). Map »

Staff writer Avery Yale Kamila has a great piece on coworking in the Maine Switch featuring Pemaquid Communications and our endeavor to create a coworking space at 28 Maple Street, what we sometimes jokingly refer to as the “Fab Lab”.

Coworking Links

Photos of 28 Maple Street (Flickr) – taken recently when it was occupied by the previous tenant, a Portland ad agency.

Coworking Survey – Take our quick survey and let us know what you’d like to see in a coworking space here in Portland, Maine.
Coworking Wiki – share ideas on coworking with people who are operating similar spaces in other cities.

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.

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.