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.

Picking a favorite Client is a little like choosing a favorite offspring – you love them all in their own special way. But annie|catherine design stationery is certainly one of the Clients I like the most. The business run by Annie Darling and Catherine Breer has always had a warm, playful friendly vibe and an amazing creativity that is inspiring. Their work is truly unique; Annie has a knack for saying just the right thing and then translating that visually. Catherine’s art captures life along the Down East coast in a way that I’m sure Gauguin would approve.

I’ve helped them create two Web sites over the years, most recently the current version, which launched earlier this year. Annie, naturally, created the design concept, since she’s really the only person who possibly could have done it justice. Throughout the process I’ve come to understand and appreciate Annie’s attention to detail. She wanted to be very precise with fonts, layout and proportion. I also admire her patience: the annie|catherine site is one of the first in which we installed a new kind of e-commerce system, and while we’re pretty good at it now, there was a bit of a learning curve at the time. Annie handled the bumps and bruises with more grace than I would have if the shoe had been on the other foot. If she could bottle that stuff up and sell it, I’m sure she would make a mint.

I’m proud of the site we’ve built together, and I’ve learned a lot about the creative process and the fine art of working together (I still have a lot to learn). I’m sure it would still be a Very Good Site without the work of Annie Darling. But I’m not at all sure that it would be a Best of the Web award winner.

Two sites designed by Pemaquid have been named Best of the Web award winners for 2011 by the Technology Association of Maine (techmaine.com). Awards were presented at the TechMaine Gala Thursday, June 23. The winning sites are:

PortlandMusicFoundation.org – Best Non-Profit Site.

annie|catherine.com – Best e-commerce Site.

Another Pemaquid site, MaineLobsterFestival.com, was a finalist for Best Arts & Entertainment site.

Two out of three ain’t bad! All three sites use the Django open source framework for content management and e-commerce. More details about the sites were posted earlier this month.

Thanks to our Clients for giving us the opportunity to show what we can do!

Three sites designed and developed by Pemaquid Communications have been named finalist for the 2011 TechMaine.com Best of the Web awards. And the nominees are….

annie|catherine designer stationery – Best e-commerce Site. Launched on Valentine’s Day, the site run by Annie Darling and Catherine Breer features creative, colorful cards and calendars adorned with Catherine’s art work depicting Maine scenes. The site, powered by the Django Open Source content management framework and its Satchmo e-commerce package, allows them to more easily manage product listings, sale offerings, gift certificates and promotional codes.

Portland Music Foundation – Best Non-Profit Site. The Portland Music Foundation is dedicated to promoting the music scene in Portland and offers regular workshops to assist musicians with their marketing and professional development. To our knowledge it is nearly unique – it’s one of only two music foundations in the entire country, and their mission takes cues from its counterpart, the Austin Music Foundation (and we all know about the music scene in Austin, right?). One unique feature is a Venue Finder, a google map mashup that helps you find the clubs in Portland, Maine where various types of music can be found. The site runs a Django CMS customized by Pemaquid and includes the Satchmo e-commerce component.

Maine Lobster Festival – Best Arts & Entertainment Site. This site redesign was undertaken as part of a class project with students from Maine College of Art, partnered with mentors in a project called Extreme Makeover – Web Site Edition. The site exposed the students to the Web design process in real life situation, and the Client a great site for a fraction of the cost. The site runs on the Django open source framework and the site uses the Satchmo e-commerce package.

Winners will be announced June 23rd at the 2011 TechMaine Gala.

About ten years ago, just as I was starting my own company, there were several Web firms vying for the attention of anxious business owners who in many cases were looking for their very first site.

One shop in particular was a darling of the local business community. They had a glittering office space in a conspicuous location on Congress Street, a dozen employees and a bright, shiny Web site.

The company principal bedazzled members of the business community with polished presentations laden with of buzzwords like “New Economy” and “splash page”. Surely he must be endowed with special knowledge!

But as is so often the case, the beauty was only skin deep. When it came time for this Web shop’s sites to perform, they were about as effective as a supermodel trying to run a hundred dash in high heels: they quickly collapsed.

I recall one site in particular built by this firm that had a so-called online registration system built for an annual conference event held in Portland. I say so-called because some companies who registered groups of conference attendees online arrived to find that they only had one set of credentials.

This was all very embarrassing to the conference organizer who had been left holding the bag after they had paid their Web shop for a site that had failed to deliver.

That firm eventually fell from grace, but the in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. “Social media” and “we do mobile!” are phrases you hear today. Why? Because it’s what people want to hear, of course.

But talking the talk is one thing, doing the hard work is another. And when every agency in town is talking about how they are experts in [---insert random skill here---], by definition they can’t all be right.

And that’s fine with me. Because while they’re all racing to say they can make the flavor of the month, they aren’t doing a single thing to differentiate themselves and cultivate the savvy that will truly set them apart.

At Pemaquid, we focus on being first, being best, being no nonsense, being practical and focusing on a common sense approach to interaction design that works (and yes, we do social media and mobile – that’s the easy part). We don’t help our Clients to simply fish for a day. We teach them how to fish, while we manage the fisheries.

It’s working. 2011 is shaping up to be our best year ever.

And that other firm, the one that made the buggy registration system? They’re gone.

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?

Well, Hello World! It’s good to see you again.

It’s been a heckuva long time since the last blog post. We’ve had plenty of work here at Pemaquid for the last several months and somehow blogging about it hasn’t ranked very high on the todo list.

I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on improving the financial efficiency of our operation, and that’s paid off so far. 2011 will be our best year ever. It’s a good time to be in Web.

We’ve launched sites for great Clients like annie|catherine designer stationery, MaineBiz Sunday, Portland Music Foundation and, launched just this week, the Maine Lobster Festival, and done work for dozens of others including Oakhurst Dairy. Social media is still all the rage and we’re helping Clients make sense of the cacophony of tweeting, facebooking and blogging.

I’m working with a great group of people now as well. Jordan Warren has left for bigger and better things in Beantown, but fortunately she’s been replaced by new Creative Services Coordinator Trish Altieri (who’s better, not bigger). Trish is just what the doctor ordered – she has experience running operations for an ad agency here in Maine, so she fit right in and is whipping things into shape. Kelsey Raymond, whom I met last fall while guest lecturing to her Web design class at the Maine College of Art, has gone from intern to humble apprentice and is developing into a fine interface producer. Walt Craven has pitched in to do the design work on several sites, including the aforementioned Portland Music Foundation and Maine Lobster Festival. Elliot Bradbury continues to work his Django wizardry and has been – thankfully! – very reliable. Suzy Massey has been displaying her black belt in CSS and HTML. And there are many more who have contributed (Bob, Rebecca, Doug – thumbs up!).

Coworking continues at Wycwah, where we’re currently sharing space with our friends from NewsSimply and Sarah Robbins of Yacht.com and of course, Alibi. It’s great to see other coworking facilities like Peloton Labs take up the idea and run (ride?) with it. We wish we had their square footage!

Lots of good things are happening in the design scene here in Portland that are encouraging. Abstract Conference, for one thing, is shaping up to be an amazing event.

So this spring has been full of win. Looking forward to a great summer!

If you live in Portland, Maine, you already know that it has more restaurants than any city in America that isn’t named San Francisco. With that in mind, Pemaquid helped create Salute to Sous, a tribute to some of the fine fare cooked up by some of the best sous chefs in town, for Oakhurst Dairy.

There are recipes from a dozen of Portland’s finest restaurants and we’ve built an interactive map to show you where to find each culinary creation. You might want to create a short list of your favorites and hit them up during November, which has been declared Salute to Sous Month.

While building this special feature, Jordan and I had to wear bibs during the late afternoon hours to avoid drooling all over our keyboards.

Do you have a favorite?

Salute to Sous Recipes

Part One in the Series: The Sausage Makers: Remaking the site of the Portland Music Foundation

They say that making laws is like making sausages: you don’t want to know how it’s done, you just want to know that what you get at the end tastes good.

For a long time now I’ve thought that that notion doesn’t apply to Web sites. I think there are lots of folks out there who want to know how a good Web site comes together. And making sure a site’s built right is essential; the best online marketing plan won’t work if your site isn’t effective and easy for both customers and administrators to use.

With that in mind, today I present The Sausage Makers – an inside look at how a real live Web site comes together here at Pemaquid Communications. We’ll talk about our things like Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Content Management, Design Concept Development, e-commerce and Search Engine Optimization as well as some of the techniques we employ in Interface Production (“front-end” coding) and Development (“back-end” coding).

We’ll also be talking about our user-centered philosophy and coding sites to be accessible to the visually/physically impaired.

And we’re going to do things completely out in the open.

If all that doesn’t sound sexy to you, you’ll be glad to know that we’ve found the perfect Client to make things interesting: The Portland Music Foundation. The PMF is dedicated to developing the music scene in Portland, Maine. They provide workshops and resources to musicians (as the bass player in Bluezberry Jam, I’ve availed myself of their very worthwhile services) and work to forge a musical identity for the area. It’s an innovative venture modeled after a similar organization in Austin, Texas – and we all know what amazing music comes out of that town!

PMF President Pat May has agreed to let people view the site development as it unfolds. We’ll be making a link to our development site available so you’ll have a backstage pass for all the festivities.

We thought it would be apropos to team up with graphic designer – and rocker – Walter Craven, front man of Lost On Liftoff, who will be working up the look of the new site. If you didn’t know it already, Walt does beautiful work, most recently as a designer with Accel Golf. He last teamed up with us at Pemaquid to create the look and feel for local club The Big Easy, a site that was nominated for a techMaine Best of the Web award a few years back. When we approached PMF with the idea for this project, and let them know we were working with Walt… well, that sealed the deal.

So get ready to strap on your hardhat and feel free to move about the job site as we nail the boards together. And keep your dial tuned to Pemaquid Crunch for updates on the design and development process.

The iPad, and other ebook-readers that are fully capable of browsing the Web, will slowly but surely (OK, maybe not so slowly) change the way Web sites are designed. That’s because they offer a new user experience when it comes to consuming online content.

It’s not too surprising when you stop and think about it. The iPad and its ilk create a new kind of user experience. With the iPad, it’s easier than ever to casually kick back on the couch and flick through Web pages, as you would a magazine. Imagine casually doing anything with a laptop.

As a result, Web design will change to make this type of “casual browsing” (is that redundant?) a more interesting and pleasurable experience. I predict Web layouts will become more magazine-like, with home pages that have large, lush photography and large headline fonts that tease you deeper into a site.

Other advances in CSS, HTML5 and browser technology will also play into making this new user experience more lively and engaging.

At Pemaquid we’ve already begun moving in that direction and are taking the iPad and similar devices into account. A perfect example is the new Web site of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra, launched last month. The bold, expansive imagery dominates the home page on a laptop or desktop monitor with a landscape layout, but it displays a quite a different – yet still successful – composition on the iPad’s narrower, taller screen.

The shape of things to come.

Clients always hope that a site redesign project can be turned around overnight. We haven’t quite hit that target yet here at Pemaquid, but last month we did manage to redesign the Web site of the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra in only a fortnight.

A big reason was the new Content Manager we’ve recently built using the Django Open Source framework. In 2010, Pemaquid has built more than a dozen Django sites (including 3 e-commerce sites) and with each site the process becomes easier – and much faster – as we hone our standard CMS package. With Django, once a module – like News, Events, Resources, Jobs or a Directory – is developed, it’s a simple matter to plug in to the next site like so many lego blocks in very little time.

Another reason is our expertise in Content Strategy. A solid Content Strategy considers the content available for a particular Web site (not surprisingly) but also the manpower available to manage that content.

In the case of the MSO, we needed to keep things simple. They had very basic content management needs (news, events/concerts, testimonials/reviews, a simple contact form and a series of article-pages). With the Pemaquid Content Manager they can update every page on the site, except for a couple of Google Maps for their venues. These administrators don’t have a lot of time for updates, but fortunately their content doesn’t change much throughout the course of the season.

There were limited creative assets to work with (a logo and a few photographs taken by orchestra members) so “simple elegance” was our mantra in pulling together the look and feel. We did want to tie into what another graphic designer was doing in creating other collateral such as posters and a program in order to make sure the branding was as cohesive as possible.

Fortunately, we had all the content in hand at the get-go, which helped tremendously in turning the site around quickly.

We did want to take a state of the art approach to layout, and we considered how the new site would look on an iPad as well as on a desktop or laptop monitor. That’s why the home page has large, expansive photos and a feel similar to a magazine cover or a poster. A lot of the essential information is readily available on the home page and teases you further into the site.

We used rgba semi-transparency on the home page, one of the latest CSS3 techniques, to lay the logo masthead over the photography and, as always, we built the site with bulletproof, standards-compliant xHTML with accessibility in mind.

The Midcoast Symphony, a community orchestra led by conductor Rohan Smith, is a truly extraordinary ensemble of volunteer musicians who perform solely for the love of great classical music. If you live in Portland or Midcoast Maine, it’s well worth catching one of their performances at Topsham’s Orion Performing Arts Center or at the Franco-American Heritage Center in Lewiston. Yes, you can friend ‘em on Facebook, and if you ask nicely maybe I’ll slip you a few tickets from the batch we received as part of the Web site redesign project.

A few weeks ago Pemaquid launched a new Web site for the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF). MeHAF advances its mission through three strategic priorities: advancing health care reform in Maine; promoting patient and family-centered care; and strengthening Maine’s health care safety net.

The goal of our redesign project was to help give MeHAF the online tools needed to share knowledge, publicize the work of its grant recipients and strengthen its position as a thought leader on health care issues in Maine.

When MeHAF approached Pemaquid in January of this year, their Web site was not helping them advance their strategy. For several years they had been using a rigid, hard-to-use content management system that had been built using proprietary programming on an ASP.net platform. The system was balky and hard to adjust to meet changing needs. MeHAF staff had a tough time understanding how to manage the CMS, let alone how to use it to communicate quickly and effectively online.

Pemaquid responded by developing a custom version of our Pemaquid Content Manager, built atop the Django framework. We were able to quickly architect a solution that allowed MeHAF to preserve and migrate all the data from their existing site. At the same time, we were able to dramatically improve their ability to self-publish content on the site. Their page templates are much more flexible and search-engine-friendly, so over time we hope to see their search positioning (already relatively good for relevant topics) improve.

With the new Content Manager in place, MeHAF can update every page on their site – and create new ones – in a way that is easy to manage and is search-engine friendly. They can even easily control naming conventions (i.e. “mysite.com/mysection/mypage”). They can update news and events, and can update the contents of a custom library of Resources.

With a little help from graphic artist Arielle Walrath we updated the look and feel of the site to match design elements from their most recent annual report, designed by Portland agency Pennisi & Lamare.

As with all Pemaquid sites, MeHAF.org is built with bulletproof, cross-browser compatible CSS and xHTML and is structured so it’s easily accessible to folks with visual and physical impediments and who use assistive devices to browse the Web.

The solid base we’ve established also puts MeHAF in position to incorporate linkages to their nascent social networking system, and Django’s Open Source framework will allow us to build an online community for sharing health information through an onsite social network/forum, should MeHAF decide to move in that direction.

Whatever they decide to do next and however they choose to approach it online, the Pemaquid Content Manager will give them a platform that allows their site to easily grow and change along with their online communications objectives.

This year Pemaquid redesigned the site of the Maine HR Convention for long-time Client Law Publishers of Northern New England. The 15th annual event, held May 11-14, 2010 at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine, had over 700 attendees and more than 150 HR Expo participants, making it one of the largest of its kind nationwide.

The Convention offers high quality education, creative events, and special camaraderie for Maine’s HR professionals. This year’s high-powered keynote speakers included former Maine governor Angus King and employee engagement expert Ryan Estis.

Over the years the Convention staff has relied more and more on Web-based information management to keep things organized as the event has grown. With the 2010 redesign Pemaquid developed or adjusted a number of custom content management solutions specifically designed to help keep things organized. Here are some of the site’s key features:

Custom e-commerce. The Convention uses a custom e-commerce app designed by Pemaquid. It allows an organization to register up to six people at a time and calculates their fee based on the number of days each registrant will attend, whether they are participating in the Convention Golf Tournament, and whether they are subscribers of other materials produced by Law Publishers. Registrants can elect to pay via credit card or be invoiced.

Custom event scheduling. With the new content management system we’ve rolled out, based on the Django framework, Pemaquid created a way for Convention staff to designate some of the items on the Events calendar as workshops. This in turn allowed us to offer additional services to registrants regarding their workshop selections.

Registrant profies. Each registrant was entered into the Content Manager, along with the dates they would be attending the conference. That enabled us to customize their user experience in a few important ways and gave Convention staff the ability to better manage registrants.

Workshop selection. Registrants were each given a username and password (which they could change) as part of their profile. This allowed them to log into a members-only workshop selection section of the site where they could choose the breakout sessions they wanted to attend. Registrants had the ability to change their selections at any time, and they could print out descriptions of each workshop they had selected for a “grab-and-go” itinerary.

Headcounts. Convention staff had access to a special page that tallied up the number of registrants who had selected each workshop, allowing them to plan room assignments based on the level of interest.

Resource library. Pemaquid designed a custom resource library which allowed Convention staff to upload Powerpoint presentations, PDFs and other materials to a password-protected section of the site where registrants can log in and download them. Resources are organized by category.

Powered by Django. With this year’s redesign, Pemaquid developed a powerful custom Content Manager built atop the Django framework. In addition to the special features outlined above, Convention staff can update the copy on any page of the site, and they can create new ones, assigning the URL for search engine optimization (“www.mainehr.com/convention/my-human-resources-page”). The Django framework, which is Open Source, enabled Pemaquid to very quickly adjust and create new content management tools for the Convention site tailored to their specific needs.

Last week Pemaquid launched a new site for Wycwah, the coworking space we share at 28 Maple Street.

www.wycwah.com

What the heck does “Wycwah” mean? An ancient Abenaki word for “coworking”? Was it the only domain name available? Nah. But you’ll have to ask us in person sometime to get the lowdown on it.

The site is a simple construction built on the Django framework. Over time, we coworkers will be using it as a learning device as well as a source of information about our space.

The beautiful logo was designed by our friend and Wycwah member Keith Sirois; interface production and Django configuration was done by yours truly.

www.facebook.com/pemaquid

113 fans and counting!

Yesterday techMaine, the Technology Association of Maine, announced finalists for its Best of the Web awards, and Pemaquid has won three nominations, more than any other Web design studio. In the past three years, seven Pemaquid sites have been nominated for Best of the Web, also more than any other studio by our count.

The nominees are….

Eastern Book Company
http://www.ebc.com
Best Corporate Image
More Eastern Book

Maine Merchants Association
http://www.mainemerchants.org
Best Non-profit Web site
More Maine Merchants

Bluezberry Jam
http://www.bluezberryjam.com
Best Arts & Entertainment Web site
More Bluezberry

Another Pemaquid site, OakhurstDairy.com, was submitted in the Best Corporate Image category, but was not named a finalist.

Winners will be announced at the techMaine 2009 Technology Awards Gala June 2, to be held at the Eastland Park Hotel.

A hearty shout-out to Pemaquid’s Web hosting Client Catherine Breer, who’s beautiful artwork is featured in the lastest issue of Maine Sunday Telegram.

Catherine brought her site, CatherineBreer.com, to us for hosting about a year and a half ago, and you can see many of her best works there, including Light After The Storm, featured in this post.

Her work is also featured at annie|catherine, the exquisite designer stationery business she shares with her partner Annie Darling. Pemaquid built the annie|catherine site, its custom e-commerce engine and its Commerce Manager, that allows Annie (Catherine’s boss) and Catherine (Annie’s boss) to upload and adjust product information for their wonderful cards, calendars and “go go wrap”.

Yesterday, as the first cases of swine flu were reported in Maine, one of our Clients, Parkview Adventist Medical Center, contacted us to put a special notice about the outbreak on their Web site, as the number of phone inquiries started to skyrocket.

We handled it by putting a “pushdown” on their home page, which linked to a page with more information on swine flu in Maine. This is a common Web design technique employed by media sites such as CNN and MaineToday.com, in which you push down the normal content/layout and insert a call out on your breaking news.

Our goals in designing our swine flu notice for Parkview were to make it:

• easily noticeable, without wrecking the layout or conveying an undue sense of alarm
• easily updatable
• accessible to visually challenged site visitors

I decided to take a tour of other hospital Web sites in Maine to see how they were handling things. Here are screenshots, taken at 4pm today, of five Maine hospital home pages:

Parkview Adventist Medical Center

Maine Medical Center

Mercy Hospital

Central Maine Medical Center

Midcoast Hospital

What I found provided what I think are teachable moments on two subjects: Web site usability and content management.

Usability

When people search Web sites for information on “swine flu”, they are scanning for text links that say, um, “swine flu”. That’s the reason we used text in the Parkview notice and made the words “swine flu” the link to the page with additional information. As of this writing, Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital use text. At Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital, they use graphics containing text.

Text in a graphic is not the same as HTML text. A proven characteristic of human behavior, banner blindness, demonstrates that people see HTML text more quickly than text in graphics. People tend to ignore graphics, in part because they are reading/scanning and in part because graphics are commonly used to display advertisements (that are usually irrelevant to the information they seek).

It’s interesting to note that both CMMC and Midcoast used a picture of someone blowing their nose. While well-intentioned, IMHO this creates mental static because such a picture could mean “common cold”, “runny nose” or even “handkerchief” and not necessarily “swine flu”.

Granted, in this case the difference is subtle, but think about your own user experience on these sites (we’d be interested in your comments).

Takeaway: If you want someone to read something, make it text.

Content Management

The layout of each of the swine flu notices give us clues as to how each hospital manages content.

Maine Medical Center – I’m almost certain they use a dynamic CMS to post News updates to the center column of the home page. I’m guessing they may have wanted to feature a swine flu notice in the Flash “marquee” (“Maine Medical Center: Centered Around You”) – and they may still do this, but the Flash is probably not part of the site’s CMS, is probably not easily updateable (and incidentally would not likely be accessible to the visually challenged).

Mercy Hospital - Again, I’m almost certain they use a CMS to update the “What’s Happening” section in the center column of the home page. I’m also fairly sure this CMS limits how prominently staff can display special notices. “Swine Flu” heading has the same color and visual weight as other sub headings in this section.

Central Maine Medical Center and Midcoast Hospital – both very likely use either a staff Web designer or contractor to create banner graphics as needed.

As we’ve mentioned, for Parkview our staff manually creates HTML pushdowns for special notices like this. At some point – for Parkview and for other Clients – it would be nice to add this feature to our custom CMS, the Pemaquid Content Manager. In the meantime, our manual updates are quick and inexpensive.

Takeaway – Content Management Systems should not impede your ability to make appropriate layout decisions. CMS’s do only what they are designed to do. If they are not designed to effectively communicate things like special notices, make sure you have access to a Web designer who can get the job done (that statement is not a back-handed criticism of the designers at other hospitals).

What do you think?

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.

Recently Pemaquid Communications launched a redesigned Web site for Eastern Book Company, a firm in Westbrook, Maine that offers book acquisition services to libraries worldwide.

The launch was successful, and the site has been well received by both EBC and its customers. But the project was not without its share of bumps and bruises. Here are some things we learned along the way.

Never underestimate the time it will take to learn new technology.

EBC uses Ingres as its main product and ordering database. Like mySQL, Ingres is Open Source, but it’s far less common. It also uses a slightly different syntax than the more familiar mySQL. This was Pemaquid’s first Ingres project.

Having worked with SQL Server and even a dash of Oracle, I figured it wouldn’t be too long before I had Ingres doing my bidding. I thought wrong, sports fans. As I should have known, when working with new technology, plug a substantial fear factor into your plans.

If at all possible, have one designer “own” the entire Design Concept

I charged one designer with creating the concept for the EBC site, based on site navigation and wire frames I developed. I have to say it came off beautifully (many thanks to Jamie Peloquin). Then (mainly due to delays in development) I relied on a couple other hired guns to add some icons and graphics to rounds things out, and I added my own touches in a few spots. The results were a little underwhelming.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing tragically hideous about the site. It’s just that every designer plays their own brand of rock and roll, and that affects the overall cohesiveness of the look and feel. That’s true of the EBC site, and there were times when we could have paid a little more attention to details (we’ll be sprucing things up a bit over time).

If possible, make sure you don’t switch horses midstream when it comes to the design.

DIY can get you DOA

I’ve always been a Do-It-Yourself kind of guy. Probably because I can’t wait for someone else to do the job, and because my Inner Control Freak usually holds sway.

In the case of EBC, I figured, what’s a little Ingres database? It’s gotta be just like mySQL, right? Um, not quite right. Wrestling with the Ingres database and the particular dialect of SQL that it speaks led to delays. I should have brought in Jeff Norris, my database gun, much earlier in the game.

Know what you know, know what you don’t know, and trust that your Web slinger friends will help you get the job done right.