RainStorm Consulting

Maine Space Grant Consortium Launches New Website

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:42:34 -0400

Maine Space Grant Consortium is funded by NASA to enhance space exploration, education, and research in Maine. Based out of Augusta, Maine, MSGC provides students, educators, and researchers with exciting opportunities to learn about and study space.

We’ve been working with Maine Space Grant Consortium since 2006. The new website has an updated look and user-friendly interface, and features rotating photographs of some of the exciting work the Consortium is doing. The website also provides a news section which is updated frequently and lets you see at-a-glance some of the great work going on through MSGC.

We used WordPress to build the site, which allows administrators to update their content seamlessly and will ensure the website stays fresh and up-to-date. We also made the site mobile-friendly so you can view it from anywhere.

Here at RainStorm, we continue to be excited about the work we’re doing with the Maine Space Grant Consortium. We encourage you to take a look at their new website. We’d love to know what you think!

Popular Mobile App, 7 Little Words, Revamps Website

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0500

7 Little Words is a fun, simple, and challenging word puzzle that is enjoyable even for those who don’t think they like word games. This mobile application has been downloaded by millions of people all over the world, and is based out of Caribou, Maine.

The popularity of mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) is increasing rapidly, and it was a high priority from the beginning to make the site adapt to numerous devices. The new 7 Little Words website conforms content to the device, enabling users to easily browse the site.

In addition, the site informs visitors of the latest news, and provides special sections for support, FAQs, and a daily puzzle. The site was built with WordPress, which enables administrators to update website content quickly and easily. If you haven’t play 7 Little Words, visit the site and get started today!

The Town of Houlton launches new municipal website

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 11:38:29 -0500

The Town of Houlton is a service center community, offering full-time police, fire and ambulance service. Nestled in Northern Maine, Houlton is a town of over 6,000 residents, and is located near the United States - Canada border.

The new Town of Houlton website is built on the easy-to-use WordPress content management system, and features a dynamic news section, community calendar, and up-to-date weather. The site also incorporates customized pages for specific sections of content (view the “doing business” page for an example). Additionally, the site contact form sends emails to different departments, depending on the type of inquiry. These new features enable the Town of Houlton to service the community in a streamlined fashion.

At RainStorm, we are thankful to have worked with the Town of Houlton, and we encourage you to visit the new site. As always, your feedback is appreciated!

New Bangor schools sites focused on informing the community

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:13:23 -0500

The Bangor School Department is a body of ten schools committed to “academic excellence for all." Located in Bangor, Maine, the school department serves thousands of students from kindergarten through twelfth grade. In working with RainStorm, the school department sought to build a site that is more modern and is geared towards informing parents and the Bangor community about the great things happening throughout the schools.

The all-new Bangor schools websites are designed to be a beautiful and useful source for information about the schools. Each of the ten schools within the department now have a full-featured website, including news updates, school-specific calendars, email newsletters, and links to online services for students and parents.

The new Bangor School Department websites are built on the outstanding, fast, and web-based WordPress content management system. This enables each school to maintain their own unique sites, while being a cohesive member of the department. The new school sites are also designed to respond to the viewers screen, enabling content to be displayed clearly and easily on mobile devices. At RainStorm, we’re excited to partner with the school department to launch and manage the sites, and we hope they make it easier for Bangor parents and citizens to stay informed about the great things happening at Bangor Schools.

Street's Landscaping showcases services with a single page website

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:10:00 -0400

Street's Landscaping is a family-owned business which provides lawn care, sitework, and paving services to residential and commercial customers in the greater Bangor area. The website is built with WordPress, and enables staff to add new photos, update content, and change the slideshow with ease.

The single page design showcases the entire site content, and scrolling is very smooth with the fixed menu. At RainStorm, this project forced staff to look outside the traditional scope of a website, and present information in a unique way.

New Alström Syndrome International website supports those with rare disorder

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:00:00 -0400

Alström Syndrome International seeks to provide support, information, and coordination world-wide to families and professionals in order to treat and cure Alström Syndrome. There are currently nearly 800 individuals with this disorder in fifty-two different countries.

The new website contains resources for families and professionals, encouraging them to join the community and connect with others. The site is built on WordPress, and has a robust experience that is easy to update. Individuals, corporations, and foundations are also able to fund its many programs and research initiatives using a simple donation form.

Interested in learning more about Alström International? Check out their website.

Paul Myer launches new website, shares life experiences

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 08:00:00 -0400

After a successful career in politics and business, Paul Myer has a story to tell. At RainStorm, we are excited to partner with Paul and develop his new website, built on the WordPress content management system. The new website enables Paul to publish new blog posts, add memories, and share life experiences. For mobile users, the site automatically adapts to the screen-size, making content easy to read.

In 2007, Paul accepted an appointment as the Executive-in-Residence at the University of Maine Business School, where he teaches marketing, management, and international business. He enjoys teaching his students about the importance of globalization, technological change, and empowerment of consumers.

Interested in learning more about Paul Myer? Check out his website today!

New Office of Equal Opportunity website promotes equality at UMaine

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:00:00 -0400

Do you know someone who was mistreated during their time at college?

It’s nearing that time of year when students & faculty settle back into the college routine. Thanks to the Office of Equal Opportunity, individuals at UMaine have an advocate to ensure the safety and equal treatment of all. The office promotes a campus climate supportive of equity and diversity through advice, education, and intervention.

To promote this vital service, the new Office of Equal Opportunity website is built on the WordPress content management system. This platform enables staff to update website content, upload photos, and create new pages quickly, with no need for outside assistance.

The new site contains important information regarding complaints, affirmative action, hiring, and much more. At RainStorm, we worked hard to ensure that the new design is consistent with the University of Maine brand. We’re happy with the finished product and thoroughly enjoyed working with the staff at the Office of Equal Opportunity.

Welcome to Luke Thomas, our newest team member

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:11:02 -0400

We're happy to introduce the newest member of our team, Luke Thomas! Luke is an experienced web developer. He's also an entrepreneur, having started multiple businesses and won three different business plan competitions.

Luke will be helping build and launch websites for client projects, assisting with client support, and helping promote clients' missions using online marketing strategies. He'll also be a member of the core team building and managing CourseStorm, RainStorm's online catalog platform for adult education organizations across the US.

Luke is a native of Orrington, Maine and a University of Maine student. He lives in Orono.

Case Study: Making the MDIBL website look great on a mobile phone, for a fraction of the cost

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:17:41 -0400

The MDI Biological Laboratory communicates with students, partners, and the community via a fully-featured, modern website online at mdibl.org. When MDIBL recognized an ever-increasing list of website visitors arriving from mobile devices, they turned to RainStorm Consulting to build a mobile version of their site.

Rather than develop a completely separate version of their site -- at more cost to them, with more maintenance time and effort required -- we revised their existing website to automatically adapt itself when viewed on a mobile phone.

You don't even need a smartphone to view the results: Just go to mdibl.org, then re-size your browser window narrower and narrower. You'll notice the site design automatically adapts, re-organizing to adapt nicely for display on a smartphone.

This approach to serving mobile visitors, called responsive design, is an increasingly attractive option for site owners who recognize the need to serve their audience with mobile devices while also looking to keep their maintenance time and costs in check. Keep it in mind the next time you consider how many of your visitors are finding your site from their phones.

Design Trends: Where are we going in 2012?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:15:00 -0500

2011 is gone so it’s time to take a look back at what happened on the web. A combination of shifting design styles and increased browser flexibility ushered in a new class of trends. So what were the big trends of 2011? And what can they tell us about where we'll wind up in 2012? Let's take a look.

CSS3 & HTML5

The growing prevalence of CSS3 and HTML5 was huge in 2011. Developers incorporating CSS3 & HTML5 have opened the door to making sites dynamic in a whole new way. We can now achieve styling effects, increasingly dynamic typography, and even leaner code under the hood of a site. We're seeing designs move closer and closer to being imageless now. Sites are more flexible than ever. Technologies such as these are what promote the use of modern browsers by rewarding users who upgrade their browsers with a richer experience.

Typography

Dynamic, embeddable type faces are popping up a lot more frequently. A recurring trend that we're seeing online and discussing here is the idea of websites getting more and more image-less. Now that the practice of embedding more unique fonts is becoming common, sites have fewer images to load and are able to scale better. Not to mention, we have thousands of amazing fonts to choose thanks to resources such as Font Squirrel and Google Fonts.

Simple Is Beautiful

We see an increased presence of all things simple: everything from more basic color palettes to simple layouts. The web is getting crowded and this visual trend is certainly de-cluttering on-screen real estate. It’s more common to see one to two-tone color schemes and there seem to be no barriers for site structure. The traditional columned-layouts have made way for freeform, unique site structures.

Mobile & Responsiveness

In 2011, as in each previous year, we saw an increase in sites that served a mobile version for users. Even here at RainStorm, one of our highest-traffic clients saw mobile use increase double from 3.5% to 7% in 2011. Although we see an increase in mobile-specific sites and apps, we’re seeing an emerging alternative known as responsive web design. These responsive sites automatically adapt to display content optimized for the user’s screen size. Go ahead, visit some of your favorite sites on your mobile device and mobile or responsive web design is sure to make an appearance.

Graphics

Visuals are getting big, both in prominence and size. We’re seeing large, rich images serve as key design and structural elements on sites. Large background images and in-line images are being used to positively break up content and make layouts more appealing and readable. We’re seeing more graphical buttons as well. The days of the default browser buttons are gone and the reign of graphical, custom, multi-state buttons is beginning.

Where are we heading in 2012?

These trends are leading to a promising 2012 and beyond on the web. Our experiences on the web are becoming more compelling as the adoption of modern browsers increases. We’re expecting to see more responsive websites and a unifying of both desktop and mobile web experiences. The web is getting more artful and dynamic and we look forward to making the most of these techniques to create more beautiful, more interactive experiences for our clients and their visitors.

A "Mobile First" development process

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski is the fifth release in the A Book Apart series aimed at those in the web industry. Like the other books in the series, this is a compact book designed to get right to the core of a particular topic.

This book is unlike Responsive Web Design, which targeted developers and contained a significant amount of code. Mobile First makes it’s points by example, and as such, of the book consists of visual examples that show both good and bad practice. The content in this book is largely conceptual and visual in nature, rather than focusing on syntax.

Wroblewski begins by framing the mobile user as a different user than the desktop user, and shows some examples of how popular sites revise their layout to accommodate mobile users. He explains that mobiles users are typically only interested in a subset of a website’s functions, and condensing your menus to emphasize common functions is a great way to appeal to mobile users. Giving yourself these constraints can help you to create a simple and easy to use mobile design.

Mobile browsers do have some capabilities that desktop visitors don’t, and Wroblewski discusses some contexts where those capabilities can make using your website easier for mobile visitors. One example of those capabilities is GPS, and if your website involves any kind of location-based search (i.e. movie times), you can auto-fill location information for the user based on their current GPS location. This reduces the amount of input that they need to perform, and only requires confirmation.

The way you organize your page for mobile browsing can also have a significant impact on how easy it is to use. Wroblewski states that in most mobile browsing, once you have selected a task or page, the primary thing that you care about is either performing that task, or viewing content on the page. The standard layout of navigation and search up top, and content below is no longer a great organization strategy, as the user is already where they want to be. Instead, put those kinds of navigation items below the content area, and put the content or task action first.

Next, Wroblewski dives into design a little bit, focusing a fair bit on touch screen users. These concerns focus largely around target area size and location. Most visitors with a touch screen operate their phones one handed, so making sure that major functions are available within thumb’s reach is important. Wroblewski also notes that many sites rely on hover functionality to bring up content, and that touch browsing visitors will not have a good way to access that content. The best way to handle this is to find an alternate way to deliver that hover content on a mobile device.

One of the most challenging and time consuming tasks on a mobile device is to input information, and Wroblewski presents a whole chapter full of strategies to make input easier on a mobile device -- from using the correct input type to setting default values as often as possible.

Wroblewski wraps the book up with chapter on layout, which seems to be a quick summary of the previous book in the series, Responsive Web Design, that discusses ways to adapt the layout of page elements based on screen resolution. It’s a nice recap of ideas, but there’s not a whole lot of new information in this section. If you haven’t already read Marcotte's book, go back and read it -- it’s well worth the time.

If you’re new to designing for mobile browsers, Wroblewski’s Mobile First is an essential overview of the focal points.

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting books on the craft of web design. If you know a great book we should review, tell us at contact@rainstormconsulting.com

Encore Leaders helps Maine people get fresh air while giving back

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

Most of us have somebody in our lives looking to be more active, or who want to volunteer but aren't exactly sure how to go about it -- for those Mainers 50 years and up, Encore Leadership Corps is an organization helping people do just that, and they've got a great new website to ring in 2012.

Encore Leadership Corps works to connect elder adults in Maine with fun, rewarding, and active volunteer opportunities in Maine's local organizations, communities, and businesses. Encore Leaders volunteers might be found cleaning up local waterways; helping to groom cross country ski trails; or helping hand out clothing or food at a local community outrech center. Whatever the task, Encore Leadership Corps makes it easy for elder adults to connect with fun, safe activities right in their own neighborhoods.

The Encore Leadership Corps website makes it easy for adults to learn more about the types of activities available; includes an online application, and features a volunteer map showing the reach and impact of volunteering in Maine.

For the staff of Encore Leadership Corps, keeping the new website fresh is simple thanks to WordPress, web-based software for managing the website's content, news, and other features.

Tell a friend or neighbor about Encore Leadership Corps, and help them get out and about while making Maine an even better place to live!

O'Brien Medical invents new ways to combat diabetes

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0500

More than 25 million American suffer from diabetes. Maine podiatrist and entrepreneur Dr. Todd O'Brien hopes to help fellow medical professionals treating the disease with his company's newest product, NeuroCheck. The product is featured prominently on the all-new O'Brien Medical website built by RainStorm Consulting.

In addition to featuring the NeuroCheck, the new O'Brien Medical website, online at www.obimed.com, includes production information and downloads on the company's other products, along with a blog where Dr. O'Brien shares his experiences as a business owner launching a new product. The site is easily maintained by Dr. O'Brien thanks to WordPress, the simple website management software keeping things running behind the scenes.

An experienced medical device inventor, Dr. O'Brien's innovative products are inspired by his years of experience treating diabetes and pre-diabetes patients at his medical practice. Now, with the development of NeuroCheck and his participation in Maine's TopGun business program, Dr. O'Brien plans to refine, launch, and promote NeuroCheck, helping doctors across the U.S. and the world better treat patients suffering from diabetes.

Making Maine library collections more accessible

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:08:56 -0500

In a digital age, libraries need simple systems to share their collections across geographic regions. With a national grant to improve Maine libraries' collection strategies, the Maine Shared Collection Strategy (MSCS) also needed a simple, professional website to report on the progress of their project to other Maine libraries and the public.

The Maine Shared Collections Strategy website does just that. With a friendly face, the website presents information and progress on the statewide project as it moves towards completion, including downloadable information and reports for the public. The website also includes news and events listings for the project's participants to keep updated and includes easy ways to subscribe to the news beyond the site.

MSCS staff have an easy system for managing the website pages, news, and file uploads thanks to WordPress, a web-based system for managing the website. With a customized WordPress theme and features, MSCS can promote their project to the public in a customized, professional way.

Moving forward with a "Responsive Web Design"

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte is the fourth release in the A Book Apart series aimed at those in the web industry. Like the books before it in the series, the book is small and intensely focused, a tactic to get you oriented on a specific web development strategy in a jiffy.

This book is targeted at front-end developers, and as such, much of the book consists of code examples (CSS, HTML and Javascript). That doesn’t diminish the relevance of the core concept for anyone involved in producing a website (including the client).

Marcotte begins the book by examining how we build websites, and starts off my banishing the practice of using pixels in your stylesheet. He examines a number of different cases for calculating with percentages for position. Getting your layout built without the use of pixels is critical for a successful responsive layout.

The remainder of the book aims to show, by example, how you can take an existing website (built using percentages) and modify the layout to fit a progressively smaller or larger screen. The best way to do this is to find the display resolution “break points”, and change the layout at those intervals.

Once Marcotte has gone through the whole process of fixing a website for multiple display sizes, he drops the bomb. This isn’t the best way to build a responsive website. Rather than building a website for a standard resolution, then figuring out how to scale it down and up, that you instead build your website for the smallest resolution first, and then work your way up.

This is radically different than how most developers currently build their websites, but the strategy has merit in that you optimize for the lightest weight layout first, then bulk up the page if and only if the resolution warrants it. Beyond the technical coding and data weight advantages, Marcotte suggests that it’s a healthier philosophical approach to building a website, as it forces you to determine right up front what the most important content is, and what is extraneous.

These are important lessons to take for your upcoming web projects, and if you can manage to make your future websites built in a responsive manner, it will almost certainly increase their longevity. More and more website traffic is coming from non-desktop devices, and it’s our responsibility to recognize that trend and to prepare ourselves.

Responsive Web Design seems to end on a perfect segue to the 6th book in the A Book Apart series , Mobile First . I’m looking forward to seeing Luke Wroblewski’s take on this web development strategy.

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting books on the craft of web design. If you know a great book we should review, tell us at contact@rainstormconsulting.com

'Designing for Emotion' helps people connect with your website

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter is the fifth release in the A Book Apart series aimed at those in the web industry. Don’t let the small size fool you: Designing for Emotion is packed with a number of excellent points and examples for designers to reference when creating an interface.

Walter identifies that facilitating human-to-human communication is emotional design’s primary goal. When you consider human interaction, it’s important to remember that a positive personality fosters trust between people. Walter suggest a number of simple tactics relating to imagery, color, and interaction to mirror that real-life experience on the web.

Designing for Emotion makes the point that users will connect more with a brand when the website builds that trust. In my experience on the web, nothing seems to invalidate my trust in a brand more than identifying a website as a cookie-cutter template experience.

Another lesson from this book is that people want what they can’t have. Twitter chose to use this tactic when they launched their latest interface upgrade in the fall of 2010.

Leaking limited screenshots online followed by rolling out the upgrade to a handful of users at first used mystery and exclusivity as emotional tools to get people excited. Twitter’s redesign also utilized the Golden Ratio. Using this visual design principle we have come to subconsciously love and recognize, users felt pleased when navigating the new interface.

The Twitter redesign is just one of many examples from Designing for Emotion. From chapter to chapter you’ll discover many great examples of how to emotionally connect to humans, convey personality, engage the user, seek forgiveness and reward, and harness trust.

How have we here at RainStorm Consulting been using emotional design tactics? One example we launched earlier this month is an upgrade to the interface of the Maine Center on Aging. Utilizing relatable human imagery in the interface, as well as enjoyable interactive elements such as information sliders, we upgraded from their previous less-active interface. Brighter color palettes as well as uniquely displaying content makes the experience trustworthy, clear, and even fun!

It’s important to remember that certain emotional design aspects are not appropriate for all situations. The designer must identify how to instill trust and ease in the user for different scenarios. It takes time to refine designs and make them more emotional, something this book will be a strong reference guide for.

One impressive example Walter highlights is the case of Blue Sky Resumes. How did Blue Sky Resumes increase their conversion rates significantly just from an emotional website design? Pick up your copy today to find out!

Editor's note: This is part of an ongoing series of posts highlighting books on the craft of web design. If you know a great book we should review, tell us at contact@rainstormconsulting.com

Case study: Helping a graduate program stay connected

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:23:56 -0500

Helping organizations succeed online means more than building a great-looking website; often web-based software and services are the tools needed to help people connect easier and work smarter.

In the case of The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Maine, the more than 100 faculty members of GSBS spread out across six locations all over Maine needed a centralized, secure, and simple system to communicate, mentor students, and host a virtual community for a demanding, multi-disciplinary graduate program.

Our solution for GSBS involves extending their existing software platform to include two new custom tools designed from the ground up to facilitate easy, friendly, and secure exchange of student and faculty data, messages, and discussions.

In our most recent case study, we go in depth to identify the specific ways that GSBS needed to work smarter, and describe in detail our two custom-built software solutions designed to help GSBS faculty and staff stay connected and focused on their goals.

Read the case study

The Maine Center on Aging website offers a wealth of services for Maine's older adult community

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:08:00 -0400

Most of us have a close friend or family member in the elder adult community -- with one of the highest populations of elder adults in the US, Maine people recognize the importance of caring for and enriching the lives of our older citizens. That commitment is shared by the Maine Center on Aging, a program that offers a wide variety of services and programs for older adults in Maine.

To promote their mission and services, the Center on Aging now has a new website featuring in-depth information on the Center's offerings, easy to read news and events, and a email newsletter sign-up. The news & information on the website is wrapped within a simple, beautiful design that makes it easy for people of any age to find the Center on Aging services that might interest them.

It's easy for Center on Aging staff to maintain the website thanks to SiteTurbine, a web-based content management system that enables creating and publishing news items, events, and pages rich with graphics and downloadable information.

When you think about the elder adults in your life, keep in mind the Center on Aging and visit them out online at http://www.mainecenteronaging.org.

Should We Go Live Today? A friendly reminder for web developers everywhere

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:53:32 -0400

At web companies like ours, the "launch" of a project -- from a huge network of websites to a single, minor update -- is one of the best parts of the job. You've completed a bit of work, and if you liked it, it's your chance to show it to the world; if you didn't, you can finally move on to that more interesting task.

However, as a company we've learned from the continual reminders of our technical lead, Matt James, that the desire to go live should always be checked against what day it is - specifically, to quote Matt's mantra on the subject, don't go live on Fridays!

Any launch, no matter how carefully tested, may have surprises, and not much ruins a launch worse than spending the weekend trying to troubleshoot it from home, or worrying that it won't be fully resolved for at least 2-3 days.

That's why we take Matt's mantra seriously here at RainStorm, and to honor his commitment to successful launches, we're happy to announce ShouldWeGoLiveToday.com, a simple tool for other web developers to help remind them that today is a great day to launch your project -- as long as it's not Friday!

If you're a web developer, we hope that ShouldWeGoLiveToday.com will become a part of your pre-flight launch checklist. We'd also love to hear your feedback or Friday launch stories on our Facebook page. Thanks for reading - and happy launching!