Pemaquid Communications

Pemaquid has launched a redesigned Web site for the Southern Midcoast Maine Chamber, the chamber of commerce based in Topsham and which represents the towns from Brunswick to Wiscasset.

We loaded it up w/alot of goodies found on no other Chamber of Commerce site in Maine, including:

• An Interactive Regional Map that is a Google Maps Mashup. Want to know where the Sebasco Harbor Resort Golf Course or Popham Beach are located? Check the box and see the Google dart.
• the swfIR (pronounced “swif-fer”) for spiffing up (I guess that’s “swiffing up”) ordinary photos that Chamber staff upload through the site’s content management system. The swfIR adds borders, shading and other effects on the fly but still supports the site’s standards-based design concept. You can see the swfIR in action dressing up the photos on the left side of the home page.
• MyMidcoast - a handy, basic, trip planner that allows people who sign up for an account to collect a list of events, restaurants, lodging establishments and activities for their next visit to Midcoast Maine.
• Microformatting of listings in the Member Directory that allows you to save a business’ contact information as a vcard and import it into a desktop address book application like MS Outlook.

The site also has a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, allowing every one of the Chamber’s 700+ members to log in at any time and update their member listings and post news and events, all moderated by Chamber staff. MidcoastMaine.com also boasts a simple ad server and e-commerce features.

A couple of weeks ago the boys over at Happy Cog released to the wild an updated version of the swfir (pronounced “swif-fer”). For those keeping score, SWFIR stands for “Shockwave Flash Image Replacement”, and it’s an easy way to give the images on your Web site a little zing.

To get it to work, you add the swfir javascript function in the head tag of your page and then a 3-line javascript just before the close-body tag. The script looks for any image on your Web page with a class of “swfir” and replaces it w/a Flash object based on that image.

You can easily adjust the script parameters to give your target image a:

• border
• rounded corners
• shadow
• tilt

…and more. You can see a demo on swfir.com.

What’s more, the swfir was designed to support standards-based design concepts and works on all the major browsers.
This is a great feature for Web designers to add to sites with simple content management systems and that will be used by people with little knowledge of graphic design to upload photos. Instead of posting simple - and sometimes bland - photography, by building the swfir into a dynamic page template designers can easily make these sites look more sophisticated and professional.
Pemaquid is actually building the swfir into a new version of the Pemaquid Content Manager on site we’ll be launching in the next two weeks. Stay tuned for that.