Web design / Portland, ME
Locals and people from away
Mainers have a phrase for anyone who wasn’t born here: “from away.” A Portland business usually serves both groups, and they want different things from the same site. The visitor booking a table in July wants the menu, where you are in the Old Port and whether you take reservations. The year-round customer wants to know you’re open in February and whether the winter menu has changed since the last visit.
Most sites try to serve both with one long homepage and end up serving neither. A better plan is to put the visitor basics up top in summer, then shift the emphasis when the season turns. We build in Framer so that switch is an edit your staff makes, not a project.
The rush, and the long quiet after it
The busy season runs roughly Memorial Day through mid-October, and cruise ships bring extra crowds on fall days when the leaves turn. A restaurant’s site does most of its year’s work in those months. Menus, hours and reservations need to be correct and quick on a phone, because people decide where to eat while walking down Commercial Street.
Then winter comes. Hours shrink, and some places close for weeks. Say so plainly on the site; few things annoy a February diner more than a dark window the website didn’t mention. Our restaurant guide goes into menus and booking in more detail.
Lobster boats and boatyards
Portland’s harbor still works for a living. Lobster boats, fish dealers, boatyards, marine electricians and the ferries out to Peaks and the other Casco Bay islands share the waterfront with the restaurants. The trade businesses there mostly sell to other businesses, and few of them have a website worth the name. A clean site that lists services, capacity and a way to reach a person before dawn gives one of them a real lead over competitors still living on a phone number and a reputation.
Island businesses have their own quirk: customers need the ferry schedule as much as your hours. Link to the official one rather than copying it, so your page is never the one that’s wrong.
Down the coast and up to Bath
Cumberland County takes in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Falmouth, Freeport and Brunswick. York County runs south along the beaches (Old Orchard, Kennebunk, Ogunquit) and takes in the mill cities of Saco and Biddeford. Sagadahoc, the smallest piece, centers on Bath. Navy ships have been built there for well over a century.
A York County rental agent and a Brunswick dentist share a metro and very little else. If you serve several of these towns, give the important ones their own pages and use the names people say out loud. For property businesses, our real estate guide covers listings and neighborhood pages.
Hiring a studio from away
Strictly speaking we’re from away too: there’s no office in Maine, and the whole studio works remotely. Calls happen in Eastern Time. Each stage of the design is a link to open in the lull between lunch and dinner. If your current site is the real problem, a website redesign keeps what works and replaces the rest. For businesses that want short video for the site or for social, we also do motion and film.
One Portland question
Can we put the site into winter mode without a redesign?
Yes. We’d set up seasonal sections you can show or hide, so winter hours, a closing notice or a spring reopening date go live the moment you publish them.