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.

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!