Pemaquid Communications

Last fall, after I gave a guest lecture to George Larou’s Web design class at the Maine College of Art, I told him about a crazy idea I had for a project. One in which Web design students could collaborate with experienced mentors to give an organization a new site while getting some real-life experience in how a Web site gets built.

Larou was excited, and graciously agreed to allow 4 willing students in his class to participate. The result was Extreme Makeover: Web Site Edition.

The students, Scott Lyle, Matt McGilvray, Meg Woods and Kelsey Raymond, teamed up with information architect Ellen Kanner, Web designer Suzy Massey and yours truly. The first task was to pick the subject of our makeover.

We finally settled upon a Pemaquid Client: the Maine Lobster Festival. All things considered, they weren’t in desperate need of a redesign, but it had been five years since the site had gotten a facelift. More importantly, because they already had an established relationship it was easier to approach them with our unconventional plan. Holly Sherburne and the rest of the Festival board enthusiastically agreed to be our guinea pigs.

For several weeks we met on Friday to plan our project. We reviewed and adjusted the site map and the students were tasked with creating their own looks based on a simple creative brief. We looked at similar festival events, including the Sundance Film Festival. We discussed the content strategy for the Web site, which needed to be simple so that it could be well maintained with minimal effort.

After a lot of experimentation and trying several approaches, former MECA student and graphic designer Walter Craven joined us in January and contributed the design concept that formed the basis for the look of the site. It was important to me that the look be really captivating, have the feel of a magazine, and look good on an iPad and other tablets. Walt’s look does that in spades.

Once we got the look nailed down, we started coding. We use four jQuery plug-ins on the site for various effects. Cycle is used to rotate the scenes from the festival on the home page. Accordion is used for the Main Events sliders on the home page. jCarousel is used to scroll through the Gallery thumbnails (also on the home page), and Fancybox is employed to display the large image overlays seen when you click on those thumbnails.

Since social media is all the rage, Meg added a Facebook Fan Page widget and a Twitter widget to most pages, along with ShareThis chicklets to the top of the right sidebar of back pages.

Kelsey helped produce all the sponsor graphics to spec and did quite a bit of the CSS, under my direction. We used opacity for the home page banner effect and used the @font-face technique to render the Chunk Five font from Walt’s comp, which we got from Font Squirrel. She also learned the joys of browser-testing and the art of adjusting her code to fix the look in every designer’s favorite browser, IE7 (nah, we didn’t worry about IE6 since it garners only about 1% of the traffic). She also ran the site through the W3C validator and found a few things we’ll be adjusting over the next week or so.

Content Management was the easy part. The site had already been set up on the Django Content Manager we use for most Client projects here at Pemaquid now, along with the Satchmo e-commerce package, which really gives you a lot of flexibility in setting up an online store. The Lobster Festival is selling their famous posters sets, and they’ll soon be able to add tickets for the live nationally recognized entertainers when those performances have been firmed up. Hats, T-shirts and other merchandise are on the way as well.

The one regret I have is that I wish we had been able to move through this project more quickly because two of our students, Scott and Matt, weren’t able to stay involved throughout the project due to other obligations. But overall I’m very happy with the way things turned out, as is the Client.

We’ve left the old site up for awhile at: http://old.mainelobsterfestival.com in case you’re curious to see what it looked like before this spring’s metamorphosis.

So that’s this edition of Extreme Makeover: Web Site Edition. Overall it went well, and I’d do it again with another group of students, because we can’t ever have enough good Web designers here in Portland, Maine.

Know of any good sites out there that need a makeover?

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.

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.