Pemaquid Communications

Have Clients asked you about the Usual Suspects yet? You know, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. If not, they will. When it comes to choosing a content management system, most people have heard of these options. They are backed by large, devoted developer communities.

But when it comes to managing the content on your site, there are a lot of options out there.

Tonight from 6-8pm at Wycwah, our coworking space at 28 Maple Street in Portland, I’ll be giving a presentation on a variety of “CMS’s”, geared towards visual designers with an eye towards how a CMS affects the visual design of a Web site interface?

In addition to the Usual Suspects, we’ll take ExpressionEngine, Concrete 5, GetSimple and Squarespace for a spin.

We’ll also take a look at a CMS Pemaquid has built on the Django platform.

This event is brought to you by the AIGA Maine.

Register in advance for $5 or bring $10 to the door. Free gourmet pizza provided graciously by Portland Pie.

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.

You may have noticed that this blog has been particularly quiet the last several weeks. True, we’ve been busy at Pemaquid, but I’ve also been spending a lot of time, with the help of my entreverge advisors (which has been invaluable), trying to get really clear on what it is that I’m all about and how I can, in my own way, make a positive difference to employees, Clients, peers and the larger community.

I’ve been in this business for almost nine years, and so far, so good. I know that sometimes I can act like God’s gift to Web, but believe me the management consultants I’ve met with recently are having a field day.

The world doesn’t need another mediocre Web shop. If Pemaquid is going to set a good example, I’m going to have to do a lot better.

But I think we’re getting there. More soon. Stay tuned.

It’s getting easier and easier for designers to make use of a wide variety of fonts in their Web projects. This is due to advances in CSS3, including the @font-face declaration, which in turn has led to the development of Typekit, a font “broker” of sorts.

I’m giving short presentation on the subject tonight to the New Hampshire Usability Professionals Association. Here are some recent, relevant links on the topic:

• Jeffrey Zeldman on the latest advances in Web typography
• W3C – CSS Fonts Module Documentation
• CSS3.info – article on @font-face
• A List Apart – CSS at 10
• Issues with IE8 and Web font rendering
• Typekit

We have a new Delicious account – delicious.com/pemaquid – that we created to compile helpful links for beginning Web designers, programmers and whoever else might be interested. There is all kinds of sites included and I did my very best to label them in an understandable way.

For the uninitiated, Delicious is a social bookmarking tool – it allows you to access links from anywhere and share them with anyone. You can also see which bookmarks are the most popular.

We’ll be adding to these links over time and because Delicious is a social bookmarking tool, feel free to add them to your Below are some of the links that caught my eye, either because they seemed really helpful, or because they seemed really cool.

If you know of any sites that you think would help out the friends of Pemaquid let us know and we will check them out and add them to our Delicious account.

http://www.w3schools.com/sitemap/sitemap_tutorials.asp – This one may be my favorite. It is tutorials for html, css, javascript, xml, ajax and a bunch of other things. It was the perfect place to start for someone who knew barely anything about the code.

http://www.useit.com/ – This is Jacob Neilson’s website, and anyone who knows anything about usability should know about him. He was the author of the textbook, Usability Engineering, we used in my GUI Design class at USM.

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ – This site lets you upload a picture and create a color palette from the colors in the picture. Do you really like how the colors in a painting, or the view as you look out your window look together? This site will give you the colors to use on a website.

http://www.1001freefonts.com/ – Looking for that perfect font for a logo or headings for a funky website? Here’s the place to look. 1001 fonts and they’re all free. Fun idea: write your next note to the office in one of the funnier ones.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/ – 53 CSS techniques you couldn’t live without! I think the title is self explanatory.

And there are many, many more (247 more to be exact). These are the ones that stuck out to me, being an html novice and easily amused by colors and fonts. I’m sure we have something that will help or amuse you too.

We’re jazzed that Web developer Casey Rosenthal has joined us down at the “Fab Lab” at 28 Maple Street. Casey runs Port 49 and he’s an accomplished Ruby on Rails developer.

Casey also organizes the techMaine Ruby user’s group and is a member of the MaineUX usability interest group. But most importantly, Casey is a staunch supporter of the coworking concept and as such we couldn’t be happier he’ll be working with us.

You can follow Casey on Twitter at: @caseyrosenthal

As I am getting accustomed to life at Pemaquid I have been getting more involved in how things work and I’m starting to actually contribute. It is one of Pemaquid’s major concerns to make sure all their websites are accessible to everyone, including the visually impaired, so I am learning about a side of usability I had never even thought of before.

When I first started my internship we had to spend some time with getting me all geared up with the right gadgets and applications. We had to discover some free software that would help with writing in HTML so I have been using a program called jEdit. It works well so far but it definitely takes some getting used to. You have to write all the code yourself, unlike in Dreamweaver where it offers you buttons and shortcuts to get things done. Though it takes more time doing things this way I feel like I am learning a lot more. The other downfall is that it doesn’t allow you to test code directly from it to a browser, so you need a way to upload to the internet to check out what you have done. I have been using Filezilla for that, which is a very nifty little tool.

We also set me up with a bunch of Firefox add-ons, like Firebug, which allows you to inspect a website while you are on it and see how each element fits into the source code. I have also been using the Web Developer toolbar add-on that allows you to validate websites, see any site without css, disable images, outline different page elements like frames, manipulate forms and many cool things.

So, I’m all geared up. I know HTML basics. Now it’s time for me to do something useful. I have been working on a form for one of Pemaquid’s clients and I think I will be posting some changes to another client’s website today, finally starting to feel like my time at Pemaquid is benefiting them as well as me!

Just a little reminder about our soiree Tuesday…

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.

Did you know that Google has an experimental version of its search engine geared towards people with special needs in the area of accessibility? One feature: when search results load, they automatically skip the navigation and search interface.

Facebook is also making an effort to improve their site’s accessibility. Earlier this week, Carl Augusto, President of the American Foundation for the Blind, wrote a post for Facebook’s blog on the subject.

Google’s Accessibility Enchanced search engine

Facebook FAQs on accessibility

No, there’s nothing wrong with our blog today.

We’ve stripped the CSS from it to mark the fourth annual CSS Naked Day, an idea that is the brainchild of designer Dustin Diaz. The idea is to promote proper use of semantic markup. Web sites content should still be readable and accessible even when the CSS is removed.

Try to imagine what some popular Web sites, or even those of some Web design firms, would look like w/o their CSS.

Come to think of it, if you’re using the Firefox browser, you can use the Web developer toolbar to turn off the CSS of any Web site. Try it. Let me know what you find. I’d love to see some screenshots (let’s not be mean, though, people).

BTW, we’re not perfect. We’re using inline CSS in the image tags to float them to the right – for now, until we upgrade the site in the near future.

Do you work in Portland, Maine? Do you create things digitally, using bits and bytes? Do you think being around other, similar folks – “Digital Creatives” – would help everyone get better?

Then you should take the Coworking Survey for Portland, Maine. It’s a quick, 13 question affair (don’t worry pilgrim, we’ll have you in and out of there in no time) intended to help us (who is “us”? we’ll get to that in a minute) find out what others might like to have in a collaborative space.

I’ve been exploring the idea of developing a coworking space in Portland for about a month now, after some poking around in the commercial real estate scene.

Along the way, I’ve bumped into Jeff Norris, Sheila Reiser and Alana Post (perhaps you know us?), and together we’ve been experimenting w/t/idea. Fortunately, right now there is a lot of downtown commercial real estate to use as our laboratory. For now, we’re working out of a space at 28 Maple St.

Other coworking spaces in other parts of the country include:

• Indy Hall- Philadelphia
• Citizen Space – in San Fran, founded by Chris Messina and Tara Hunt, pioneers iof the concept
• Launchpad - in Austin, TX, home of SXSWi

If you’re a Web/Graphic artist, programmer, podcaster, digital video producer, information architect, copywriter – really anyone who uses bits and bytes to create stuff – we’d love it if you could take a minute to give us your thoughts on this idea, which I submit will be the work environment of the future. Or at least comment this post.

Keep an eye on this space for survey results.

it’s been said that the goal of good design, layout and typography is to honor content. I believe that an excellent Web design concept lends credence to what’s being written.

In some ways, a Web site is like a garden. After its built, if not carefully managed, the “weeds” start popping up and things can get a little overgrown. This site is no exception.

I’m proud of this site, but this site needs some adjustments, to keep up w/t/latest design techniques but more importantly to allow me to more easily do the things I’d like to do.

For example, on this blog you can’t easily highlight code snippets. That means more time is needed to style things any time you want to write about code, and that’s not a best practice.

So…time to weed the garden… or maybe even rototill it. Stay tuned.

Update: Created a style for highlighting code:

<script type="text/javascript" src=""> </script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=""> </script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=""> </script>
<script type="text/javascript" src=""> </script>

I’ve been tooling around the Internet for the last few days and I’ve noticed that one thing hasn’t changed much in the last ten years: Web sites are almost always accessible, or well-designed, but hardly ever both.

I’m not sure why. At Pemaquid, while we’re not perfect, we always build a high degree of accessibility – at least Level AA – into every site we develop. (Go ahead, check out the sites listed in our Portfolio and run them through your favorite accessibility checker – as long as you don’t bother w/some of the ancient table-based sites towards the bottom of the list.)

Accessibility is only going to become more important as time goes by. You may recall that Target recently settled a lawsuit brought against it by a blind man whose screen reader couldn’t weed his way through the hideous code soup Target’s development team put in front of him.

Companies and governmental organizations are only going to find it more and more important to build accessibility into their sites. Web designers should be up to the task.

Fortunately, when you add accessibility to your Web site, it doesn’t have to ruin a good design concept. It doesn’t have to add cost or overhead to your project either. You just have to take the time to learn about the core issues and build it into your design process.

More Web designers should understand the issues around accessibility and become accustomed to being a problem solver regarding them. The ingredients: an understanding of Web standards and the Web Accessibility Guildelines. A solid understanding of CSS can go a long way towards helping designers deal with accessibility challenges to their design concepts.

One person who uses the latest CSS techniques to create sites with amazing visual designs along with a high degree of accessibility is Andy Clarke (@malarkey on Twitter).

I hope to get back to my roots a bit and start writing and speaking more about accessible design and how the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I’d love to know what issues you’ve faced regarding accessible design.

Last night I released a new Facebook app for my band, Bluezberry Jam.

It’s a nifty little jukebox of sorts. You can play original songs from our upcoming album and add your favorite to a box on your Facebook profile, where your friends can play your fav, click back to the app, listen to our tunes, add it to their profile, where their friends can see it…

Devious, isn’t it?

It’s very similar to an app we launched last year for another local band, Lost on Liftoff. These are great little street-level tools for building buzz around an album launch.

Pemaquid also hosts both BluezberryJam.com and LostOnLiftoff.com, and both bands use the Pemaquid Content Manager to self-publish site updates.

The Maine Commission for Community Service works to get people involved in volunteer activities throughout the state. The Commission’s site, at MaineServiceCommission.gov, is the place where they report to the public and their stakeholders how effective they’ve been in achieving their goal.

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.

There are a ton of content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix). So how do you decide which one is right for you?

In selecting a content management system – or CMS – for your Web site, it’s important to remember that you don’t want to compromise the user experience or the accessibility of your site just so you can slap another page up there.

You also don’t want to become a slave to your CMS; it should work for you, not the other way round. It shouldn’t unduly compromise your ability to organize content on your site.

Some of the most popular systems include: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and Silver Stripe (all of these are open source; Silver Stripe was used to create the Democratic National Convention Web site).

At Pemaquid we’ve worked with dozens of these content management systems. Usually, however, we stick with the one we’ve developed ourselves: the Pemaquid Content Manager. The basic package can be installed quickly and inexpensively, but it’s easily customizable.

Are we proud of our little CMS? Yes. Is it the right solution for all situations? No.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take an in-depth look under the hood of some of the most popular content management systems and examine the pros and cons of using them.

Come on down to techMaine’s Web Designers Users Group meeting October 20 @ 6pm to hear Jen and me sound off on CSS and why it’s a smart way to build Web sites. We’re trying to decide how much advanced CSS sorcery people want to see, so help us frame the discussion through your comments.

From the program:

Learn how to build better Web sites through the effective use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). When combined with that other acronym (HTML), CSS can help you create sites that download much more quickly, are less costly to maintain, are more accessible, are more search engine friendly and are more flexibly structured. This session will give you a brief overview of the basics, a look at practical approaches to solving challenging design and layout issues as well as some advanced razzle-dazzle (that’s the technical term for it).

About the Speakers: Rob Landry and Jennifer Ecker of Pemaquid Communications, LLC have their black belts in CSS and Web Standards-based design techniques. Pemaquid was one of the first Web design studios in Maine to use CSS exclusively for layout. Pemaquid Clients include Camden National Corporation, Oakhurst Dairy and the Maine Lobster Festival.

Door Prize: Registered attendees will be entered in a door prize drawing for a copy of the Sitepoint book, The Art and Science of CSS, by Cameron Adams et al., courtesy of O’Reilly Books. You must register and attend to be in the drawing.

Way back at the dawn of time – you know, 1998 – people gave lip service to something called the “New Economy”. Middlemen, it was forecast, would soon be “disintermediated” out of financial transactions as “commerce” became “e-commerce”.

Then the bubble popped, sock-puppet mascots became extinct, real estate companies continued to prosper, and everyone generally took their eyes off the business transformations underway. Recently, however, I was taking stock, and things are definitely changing, though perhaps in slow-mo. Let’s recap:

Encyclopedia salesmen? Gone. Wikipedia and Google rule. ‘Nuf said.

Newspapers? On life support. Readership is down sharply as consumers gain more comprehensive and convenient access to information online. Start writing the epitaph.

Record companies? Current business model is dying. When the cost of reproducing your product falls to zero, it’s hard to make money on album sales.

Real Estate agents? Their days are numbered. Their monopoly over home listings through the MLS Listing service, their key advantage – will end; it’s a matter of time (see Zillow).

You could even say that employers have less control over their employees – especially those who are tech-savvy. Workers who are wise in the ways of the Web can use their online connections to cobble together a decent living by utilizing their social network.

Last, but certainly not least, here’s the kicker I’ve been building up to: software. We’re all familiar with Open Source software these days. The idea is that when you open up your source code to a vast online array of collaborators – when you loosen control – you get better apps.

It seems to me we’re moving towards an Open Source World. As traditional business categories yield to the Information Age, it seems like people will get better information, more conveniently, and at a lower cost. That seems like a good thing to me.

It also seems inevitable.

I don’t know why it took me so long, but it finally hit me – Twitter is the new blogging.

I remember when blogging first came on the scene – it took me awhile to ‘get it’. Why, I thought, would someone take the time to post their musings about the everyday, and who would care? I couldn’t see the point of most of it initially, though now the Web is full of thoughtful, colorful and amazingly informative blogs on every topic, and you don’t have to look hard to find detailed information about something that’s of interest to you.

Now, we have Twitter and everyone, it seems, is tweeting. For the most part, these tweets are pretty mundane (“…heading out for a bikeride…”, ” Trying to finish up several key deliverables so I can get out on the boat today ” and even simply “Baseball”) are samples of the <140 character slices-of-life you'll find when you follow someone's twitterings.

You could call all this 'micro-blogging'.

I'm not sure how meaningful all of this is, where it's all going or even what any of it means, but I do know one thing - it's an exploding cultural phenomenon. Just like blogging was a few years back.

I've learned my lesson. This time, I'm going to pay attention to the cultural changes wrought by the Web and work harder to understand what it all means.

Follow me on Twitter