Pemaquid Communications

We know lots about real estate agents, lawyers, doctors, butchers, bakers and candelstick makers, but when it comes to Web designers worldwide (let alone Web designers in Maine) there’s not alot of information about who’s doing what. Jeffrey Zeldman and the folks at A List Apart are aiming to change all that with the first annual Web Design Survey.

Tonight I took the survey - yes, on a Friday night, I have no life offline, folks - and if you’re a designer, you should too (um, no, I didn’t mean you should take it on Friday night).

Hopefully, finding out more about Web designers in general is a first step towards doing something that could be considered even more important - developing Best Practices and professional standards for the industry. (Kind of like a Web Standards Project for the people who do design, perhaps?)

In a way, it’s interesting to think that there are licensing procedures or certifications for other professions (like those real estate agents, lawyers and doctors) but none that I can think of for the guy who’s going to design your e-commerce app.

No this is not about hiring a Web Designer for Pemaquid - though that’ll happen soon enough - it’s about how to select the company that’s going to build or redesign your site.

Recently I was reading an article in which the question was whether a potential Client should pick a Web design firm based on how much experience the Web design company had in the Client business’ industry.

I’d wager that that misses the point. When selecting a Web design firm - whether your business is in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon - the most important thing is not how much the designer knows about your industry, it’s how much they know about Web design.

There are plenty of firms out there w/marketing expertise in a particular industry, and they even may have built lots of sites, but all the industry savvy in the world will not help them understand the psychology of how people surf a Web site and how to make that site engaging and easy-to-use - a resource for its audiences.

The Eagle Has Landed (sorry, I always wanted to say that…)

If you haven’t already, you might want to join the rapidly-growing group of people who are making the EagleCam, managed by the BioDiversity Research Institute of Gorham, Maine, one of the most popular sites on the Web. So far, viewers have seen romance (eagle-style), battles-against-the-elements (the birds have braved four storms, including an unusually heavy snowfall), suspense (had their eggs survived those storms?) and a surprise plot twist (a chick was born April 11 after biologists had concluded that the birds had failed to keep the eggs warm enough to make it through the cold, harsh spring).

The EagleCam is proving to be Must-See TV. When the eagles returned to their nest about a month ago, the folks at BRI said traffic to the site exploded to 8 million hits in a single day as a result of an Associate Press story on the topic. Traffic died down a bit afterwards, but now that there’s a chick to watch, you can bet there will be another, even bigger spike.

There are a handful of eagle cams out there, but apparently at least Google seems to think BRI’s is important: It’s the #1 search result for “EagleCam”.

In late February BRI asked Pemaquid Communications to redesign the site. The challenge was to get the new look in place before the new addition to the family arrived. How it got done is a case study that could be the subject of a separate post, and the site is still a work in progress, but we got the major features/pages in place.

Future work may include working with National Geographic (provides the live feed) to upgrade the presentation of the live cam object code to bring it in line with Web Standards, placing the rest of the low-traffic back pages into the new look and feel and possibly putting together a photo gallery (BRI has tons of great wildlife photography). And don’t forget the EagleCam Blog (updated by wildlife biologists) and… the LoonCam (inactive right now).

Stay tuned…..

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.

One thing I (still) see all the time on Web sites is Click Here!! As in: “Click here to read more about this amazing story…” or “Click here to register…” or “Click here to purchase…”. Click here … Click here … Click here.

This has got to stop, people.

If you’re developing content for a Web site, there are more effective ways to write your link text.

First, remember that people scan Web pages for links that are labeled with keywords they are looking for. A page loaded with “click heres” doesn’t support this quick-scan activity.

Second, “Click here” doesn’t say anything informative. Use verbs (er, other than ‘click’, please) that call to action. “Buy”, “Register”, “Shop”, “Search”, “Find” all work much better. Category labels also work well (”Shoes”, “Coats”, “Hats”, “Shirts”, etc.) and help readers distinguish between the different choices.

Third, editing out “Click here” will help tighten up the copy - always a good thing.

Finally, if we’re talking about a hyperlink, isn’t it already obvious you can “Click here”?

So, please be kind to your Web site visitors. Don’t tell them to “Click here” (they’ll figure that out). Tell them what they’ll get when they do click.

If you spend enough time reading Web pages recently, you may have come across the term “mashup”. You were probably not even reading your favorite news site’s description of the latest rush hour mishap. Instead, it probably accompanied a description of the newest “Web 2.0″ site.

For the uninitiated, a mashup is when you take an app from one or more Web sites and “mash” it all up w/content on another, usually to create a uniquely interesting - and hopefully, useful - interactive feature. The most famously popular example of a mashup is probably the Google Map API, which all kinds of people have incorporated into all kinds of sites to provide geographic information in creative ways.

We’re excited to say that at Pemaquid we’re working on our own Google Map mashup for a Client in the tourism industry to provide an interactive mapping feature to show Maine points of interest to the folks from away. Can’t tell you too much more right now - it’s Top Secret - but we’ll be launching it soon. Stay tuned….

The post that had been displayed here has been moved to a more appropriate venue.  You can read it here.

Well, here goes, a very impromptu attempt to keeping all you folks up to date on how I’m doing this week in Austin @ South By SouthWeb interactive. This is a grand experiment - Stay tuned….