Pemaquid Communications

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 »

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.

Eric Meyer, one of the zen masters of CSS coding, has a new product out called CSS Sculptor that makes creating Web standards compliant layouts as easy as pie.

CSS Sculptor integrates w/Dreamweaver, and has templates for more than two dozen of the most common layouts, whether they be fixed-width, liquid, fruit-juicy or nutty-crunchy.

So if you’re a Web designer who’s just coming up the CSS learning curve, you might consider adding CSS Sculptor to your tool kit. Rock on!

There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal on Apple CEO Steve Job’s drive to minimize buttons. As most people in the known universe understand by now, Apple’s new iPhone lacks buttons found on other cell phones and, well, almost every other handheld device.

It’s part of Job’s overall design aesthetic - which you could sum up as Less is More.

I was reminded of Less is More a few days ago when a friend sent me a link to a new online ad campaign being run by Volvo. Shortly thereafter, I bumped into the ad campaign’s message again as part of a larger post on the topic on 37 Signals’ blog.

Less is More is certainly a good mantra for Web interface designers. Avoid “Nascar Syndrome” (the tendency to load up an interface w/links and features regardless of how often they’ll be used - hmm, there’s another post in there somewhere…) and focus on a simple, clean design that’s easy to understand.

For those of you who still may be wondering if, instead, More really is More, I submit this for your consideration:

AT&T reports that 146,000 iPhones were sold in the first two days the product was on the market. Normally those would be exceedingly good sales figures for any cell phone, but they didn’t live up to the hype surrounding the launch of Apple’s latest product, so the company led by Steve Jobs took a hit on Wall Street.

Apple is scheduled to report some numbers related to iPhone sales later today.

Do you have an iPhone and live in Portland, Maine? How’s it been treating you?

Apple has launched Safari 3, the latest version of its Web browser. Probably the most interesting thing about it is that for the first time it is available for Windows.

In terms of Web design, one of the good things about this announcement is that Web designers will now - finally - be able to apply CSS to form elements like input and submit.

Downloading….

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.

Marc Andreessen muses on his blog about switching to Mac after using a PC for the last 13 years. What does Andreessen, creator of the first browser - Mosaic - and a co-founder of Netscape, like best?

The most wonderful thing about the Mac in 2007 is that it has what Bill Joy refers to as the “it works” feature.

I’ve followed a similar path. After many years of using Windows, I finally got a Mac PowerBook Pro in February. Like Andreessen, who wanted ‘…to experience what most of the rest of the world was using…’ I felt pretty strongly about having a user experience that was similar to most Clients when surfing the Web.

Things finally came to a head for me, though, when: it took too long for my Windows XP machine to start up in the morning (10 minutes would be generous) ; it’s memory ran low (it happens to the best); and I realized I could run Windows apps on my Mac (that was the kicker - I use Parallels).

Not to mention the fact that I was planning on attending South By Southwest Interactive and would look like a total dweeb if I was the only one with a Dell (My fears were well-founded; I could count on one hand the number of PC laptops at the entire SXSW convention).

After a few months, it’s the little things about my Mac that mean a lot. I can’t explain it b/c I’ve never had the time to thoroughly investigate, but it seems like it’s easier/faster to do things like check my email. I’m betting that one fewer click for this or that activity is the reason, and after a while all those clicks I don’t have to make add up to a significant increase in productive time.

I’m trying really hard not to be a Mac snob, but that’s just it - I find myself trying really hard.

Did you know: People are already selling iPhones on eBay, even though Apple’s highly-anticipated cellphone doesn’t officially hit the market until June 29th?