Update amended: 8:50 p.m. 4/19/09

From time to time in the recent past, one of the most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia has gotten a major redesign.

Unfortunately, there was never one source that covered the whys and the hows. Now there is: Technically Philly.

So, here’s the first in an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

Both of Philadelphia’s big alternative-weeklies have changed their online looks in recent months. It just so happens that the one that came out last may have started first.

At the end December, CityPaper, founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, went from this to this. And then, early last month, Philadelphia Weekly made its own jump from a cluttered display.

“We knew we needed to step up our platform online, not just re-skin the site,” says Keith McGinnis, the IT Web head over at Review Publishing, PW’s Samson Street-based parent company. “Now we have a platform that can help us rise to the occasion.”

Though PW’s move came just months after a big redesign from CityPaper, their primary rival, it wasn’t much more than coincidence, McGinnis says. Review Publishing and PW staff began sketching the overhaul at the end of 2007.

“From a design perspective, it was about making [the site] look more pleasing. From a traffic perspective it was about decreasing bounce rate and increasing time on site,” McGinnis said. The changes include lots of new user interaction and two new robust listings services.

It’s meant to be a major step for the weekly, which was founded in 1971 as the Welcomat, and focused on moving their product off the homepage, which previously got almost all PW’s traffic.

Their CMS remains Clickability and, though McGinnis declined to give details, the site also uses a variety of third party services integrated for different functions. The new design was outsourced to O3 World, a Northern Liberties firm owned by Mike Gadsby, Keith Scandone and Mike Terkanian — “shout out to Gads, Keith and Terk,” McGinnis, 31, says.

Of course, PW has its detractors, most notably former staff writer Joey Sweeney, who has used his popular city blog Philebrity to rail on the design — before it was even launched. He took particular issue with alternative weeklies cobbling together large databases or other functions that have established competition, like listings.

The new PW site has done just that, including detailed real estate listings and an events calendar, but McGinnis, who is celebrating his eighth year with PW’s parent company, says the fight isn’t as lost as Sweeney suggests.

“In my opinion, it’s not really about competing with Craigslist. It’s about having an audience who trusts your brand, and then giving them a classifieds-type marketplace to buy and sell items. The one advantage we do have is locality,” McGinnis says.

The site now features an expanded registered-user area and PW now offers embedding code for its self-hosted video. Users can also now comment and rate all content and review bars, restaurants, events, and other businesses in the listings section. Readers also now have the ability to submit bands and musicians for PW to review, and suggest events, restaurant, bar, realtors or other businesses to their “guides.”

“From an audience perspective, it’s the overall relief that the site is much more pleasing to look at and much, much more functional,” McGinnis says. “A few geeky items: the headline font on the site for all content is swapped out with flash using SiFR. So the headlines aren’t a standard web browser-safe font. You don’t see it everywhere, it looks hot, and it’s a tip of the cap to print in a new media world. We’re getting to take advantage of our vendor’s Akamai delivery network, something I never though I’d get to work with.”

One back-end feature he most like is the new automation of Print2Web and Web2Print.

“So anything that starts in either workflow can be crossed over to the other rather seamlessly,” he says. “I’m really proud of this. Most print publishers are dealing with it. It’s a well known challenge of making the transition from newspaper to new media publisher.”

He also says there were profit-driven changes.

“There was an effort to create a balance of display ad inventory, traditional banner advertising, sponsorship opportunit[ies] and new methods,” he says. “Mostly where IAB standards were placed, how many per page, what type of ad units would be allowed, etcetera.”

PW is making additional revenue with its new “premium listings,” ad boxes posted throughout the site landings and placed heavily in their various guides. Entries from those guides purchased the higher profile space, giving an event, band or business more visibility, he says.

When it comes to an alt-weekly bringing the daily traffic necessary to generate online revenue, McGinnis won’t discuss PW’s plans in detail but says he isn’t too threatened by fears of declining advertising revenue.

“It’s really about finding alternatives to banner ads,” McGinnis says, “It all comes back to the basics. Generate an audience, captivate them with content, organize relevant advertisers around that audience and you’ve got a business model that will work.”

During the next six to eight months ACWeekly.com and SouthPhillyReview.com will see the same platform shift. But it started with PW. After the beginnings of that design, McGinnis says it’s hard to imagine the staff could have known what the alt-weekly world would have looked like when it launched.

“It just so happens, one and a half years later, the economy had tanked and Philly newspapers were going bankrupt the week we relaunched,” he says. “It’s either the best time or the worst time to be in the media industry. The difference is only where you are standing.”

Follow Keith on Twitter here and Philly Weekly here.

What do you think about their redesign? What’s good and what isn’t?

When major Philadelphia Web sites change, Technically Philly will find out why in The Redesign. Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

Finally, flight travel will be civilized.

American Airlines is going to install Gogo Inflight Internet on more than 300 of its domestic aircraft during the next two years, according to a boring company press release.

Forth Worth-based American Airlines, which has Market West offices, claims to be the first U.S. airline to launch the service, which they did last August on 15 Boeing 767-200 aircraft. It (lamely) primarily served nonstop flights between New York JFK and San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.

Requests for the airline to apologize for not focusing their efforts on the Philadelphia International Airport were rebuffed by a marketing intern.

American is going to install the company’s Aircell system on its domestic MD-80 and Boeing 737-800 aircraft fleets, beginning with 150 MD-80 aircraft this year, according to the press release which could be making up all those numbers because I sure don’t know what they mean.

“Our trial over the past six months offered customers the choice to remain connected to work, home or elsewhere when flying on American Airlines,” that intern probably wrote and then attributed to Dan Garton, American’s executive vice president of marketing in a press release. “And it also gave us the ability to study customers’ willingness to take advantage of high-speed, onboard connectivity and to gauge how the service performed technically in a variety of settings over an extended period of time. We are pleased that the results were positive and that we have decided to move forward.”

Some dirty details from the AP:

Prices will range from $5.95 for some redeye flights to $7.95 for using a handheld device, $9.95 for using a laptop computer on a flight up to three hours, and $12.95 for using a laptop on a longer flight. Aircell plans to add other prices for day passes and perhaps monthly subscription rates for frequent fliers.

Travelers can sign up on the ground and connect once the plane reaches 10,000 feet in altitude. They’ll use their browser to connect to Aircell’s Gogo portal site.

…

Backelin said the Internet access will be filtered to block pornographic sites, the airline at first said it wouldn’t do that, but relented after hearing complaints from customers and flight attendants. And American won’t allow voice-over-Internet phone service, to keep chattering to a minimum [Source, emphasis ours]

In other American Airlines news, you can use bonus miles to go to the United Kingdom, or something like that.

On Monday, the Center City-based company announced that it had reached a licensing agreement with Fox Television Studios allowing users of the online video sharing platform to syndicate online customized clips from 27 of Fox’s regional television stations.

Technically Philly sat down with RedLasso CEO Al McGowan and President Kevin O’Kane Thursday evening to discuss how the deal went down, where they’re looking for funding, and what Philly entrepreneur Pat Croce has to do with the video sharing company.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

Explain what’s been happening with RedLasso and the recent licensing deal

Al McGowan: When Kevin and I got together a few years ago, we said look, ‘This marketplace is changing. The way people are consuming media is changing. Let’s work with our friends in the media and figure out a way to help solve that problem for them.’ Kevin found some technology and put it on top of media, which allowed them to digitize it and extend the life of that content, especially on the news and information side.

Broadcast goes out on the air and right into the garbage can. Why not capture and digitize it and let it have another life on different platforms, like mobile and the Web. So we designed a platform that allows extending the life of that content to keep monetizing it. That’s the whole basis of RedLasso.

Kevin O’Kane: If you look at what’s driving the media downturn, it’s several factors. Out of a lot of the industries, media’s probably getting hit the hardest. If not the hardest, than one of the hardest. But with adversity comes opportunity. We think that’s where RedLasso fits nicely by being able to validate and show other monetization opportunities in a very efficient manner. You’re doing more with less now, so for us to try to monetize your content, you don’t have to do a thing. It’s not going to cost you anything.

When you were developing the technology, did bloggers and the way that the news cycle had changed online drive the vision?

KO: Absolutely. When the company originally started we had business-to-business clients. Sports teams, politicians, and others were using it to keep track of the buzz in the media. We started looking out to see what could be a good consumer application. Some of our friends in the broadcast business said ‘this is cool, but how do we consumerize this application.’

AG: To step back, when we started this thing, we didn’t believe that media companies would be ready to let their content go to the consumer. We thought they’d want to keep it internal at first, re-purpose their own content, and model the competition. When we went to them, they immediately said ‘no, we’re already there. The ketchup’s already out of the bottle. Let’s find a way to go to the consumers.’

So we switched our timetable because we thought that was going to be a year to 18-months. We changed our focus from B2B to the consumer. We launched the beta to the blogosphere because we thought it would be a good way to test it. What happened in the first month, we thought was going to take a year to happen. It just went from there.

If the media companies were on board, why the copyright suits?

KO: Sometimes there’s a breakdown in communication between business people and attorneys in large corporations. Two, it’s changing, but there’s no language for what we were doing in the licensing models in place between program providers, networks and cable companies. Third, maybe we got too big too quick? Our intention was to never do it without having proper licensing in place, and certainly not to monetize it without licensing. Which is why once we got hit with the suit, we took the site down, and settled it fairly quickly. And now we’re starting to sign up some partnerships.

AG: One of the groups involved in the suit was Fox TV, and they’re now the first TV group to actually give us the license to do what we were doing in the beta. So we validated that platform. I think they’re happy to be working with us and we’re certainly happy to be working with them. It’s a great validator for what we built.

The Fox Television Stations deal only covers local content. Looking forward, where do you want to be?

KO: We would love to have agreements in place with anyone in broadcast television. We’d like to nail down some of the national channels. We’d love to go real deep in local because we think there’s long-tail opportunities for broadcasters there as well. We’re into that real perishable, water cooler stuff. You’re not going to come to RedLasso to watch Lost.

As soon as Red Lasso disappeared, networks seemed to get on board with online content. How much have things changed?

AG: I don’t think we were the originators of the thought process, but we built a platform that was going to be the future state: aggregated content that was available almost real-time that users could interact with and customize. We built something that we thought was the future. What’s going to happen is each individual station is going to go out and allow to happen what we were allowing to happen through the beta. What they’re not doing, other than Hulu, is putting that all in one place to find stuff quickly in a relevant manner.

For our entrepreneur readers, how did you start the business?

KO: We started out of my house. I used to run Channel 57, and through the magic of consolidation I was able to pursue other opportunities. Literally I was out of a job. It really hadn’t hit yet, but you could feel the tides coming, that the digital explosion was really going to rock the media world. Knowing the challenges that laid ahead, I asked ‘do I want to get back in line at an existing parade or jump out and start my own parade?’

AG: I knew Kevin through the broadcast business and we had worked together on some other projects. I worked part-time on RedLasso early on as Kevin devoted almost 100 percent of his time to it. Then, we eventually got to a point where we able to show it to people. Kevin, you have to tell the Pat Croce story.

KO: I had contacts with the sports teams, and they had an appetite to stay current with the media. A friend of mine set up a meeting with Pat Croce, who I knew, and that morning he happened to have been on WPHT talking about the birth of his granddaughter. So we loaded RedLasso and typed in ‘Croce.’ Bam. There he is from an hour ago on the radio, talking about the birth of his granddaughter. He was like: ‘This is effin’ magic.’

Did you secure venture capital funding for the project?

AG: Once we decided we had to go consumer, it was going to require a whole different infrastructure and a whole different level of development. We went to some friends who were able to put together a consortium of venture capitalists from Guggenheim to Osage to Ample Capital, and they helped fund the company to where it is today. We’re in the process of raising some additional money now that we’ve relaunched the company, and we hope to have some news on that in the next couple months.

Now that you’re trying to find funding again, how has the market changed?

AG: The evaluations are down, and you know, finding capital is just much more difficult because cash is king at this stage of the game. There are a lot of opportunities out there that are more secure than start-up technology companies. Your sources of capital become much more limited because guys out there are looking to conserve it and keep investing in the bets they’ve already placed. It hasn’t been easy, but we think we’re very close to hopefully closing an equity round in the next 30-60 days.

Where is media going to be in the next couple years?

KO: Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t think TV stations are going away. They certainly may have less news sources as business gets tough. Just look at what newspapers are going through. Then, there’s citizen journalism in play. There’s a line between what is professionally produced and what is amateur, and it’s going to start to blur more. At the end of the day, the best content is going to win.

AG: The way people consume is going to change. It already has, but it’s going to shift more to where you become an active participant in looking for what you’re interested in. And it’s going to be a three screen world. It’s going to be mobile, screen at your desk, and the screen at your home. You’ll get your information and entertainment from those three screens. The question is, how is it going to shift? It’ll move from the big screen to the small screen, but it’s also going to move from the computer screen to the big screen. Content is going to be platform agnostic, because people live that way.

What have you learned from the licensing deal with Fox? What’s changed about licensing content?

AG: What’s changed about it is the attitude of publishers. When we first started having this conversation, not everyone was sure that they wanted to let their content go outside of their site. Go to any large company where there’s ten people in a room that have to make a decision. Three of them are thinking forward about the future. There’s three at the other end of the table saying ‘there’s no way I’m ever going to let that happen because it’s going to affect my job.’ The other four in the middle are scratching their heads.

What I think we’ve learned by doing this deal, is that they’ve gotten the ten guys in the room to all agree that they should try this. That it makes sense to let the consumer have access to their content. Now they’re saying ‘Let us take our content and move it outside our walled-garden and take it to where other eyeballs are that maybe we’d never reach otherwise.’

We’re not saying anything that we haven’t said for the last 24 months, it’s just that we now have a license to go out and actually do it.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

It’s on.

Technically Philly reported Wednesday that Cricket had the world’s largest cell phone outside the the Shops at Liberty Place. Yesterday, Boost crashed the party.

Less than a half hour after Cricket’s promotional team set up its cell phone and surrounding activity for Thursday’s lunch-time crowd, a flatbed truck – depicted above – hauling a Boost Mobile advertisement and playing an endless loop of Boost boosting began circling the Market West corridor.

We can’t confirm that it ever actually drove down the 1600-block of Chestnut Street, crossing Cricket’s path, but the truck’s presence was most certainly known in the dreary drizzle of a Center City afternoon.

Everyone knew this was going to get serious when Cricket announced it was joining the crowded prepaid mobile field in Philly. Now it has.

If anyone sees anymore of this nonsense, let us know. Think Metro PCS will join the fracas?

Expect some more detailed analysis from Technically Philly.

If you see something related to tech happening in the region, e-mail us or send a photo from your mobile device to info@technicallyphilly.com!