Next American City: urban policy journal moves to online-only with Forefront, relaunches web site

Next American City, the nine-year-old Brewerytown-based urban policy journal, is launching its redesigned web site today in honor of its move to all online content.

Visit the new site here.

Not only is it a redesign, it’s also an experiment in selling national content.

The redesign is launching alongside the birth of Next American City’s Forefront, a new online weekly journal that will feature a new piece of long-form urban journalism every Monday. Each piece can be purchased individually ($1.99) or a reader can purchase an all-you-can-eat, 12-monrg digital subscription ($17.88).

The web site will serve as a national aggregator of urban journalism that will be available for free through partnerships with 100 urbanist journalism outlets across the country, according to a press release.

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Phila.gov gets redesign and new features to “demystify the workings of the city”

Long criticized for sub par aesthetics, the official website of the City of Philadelphia, Phila.gov, underwent an overhaul and relaunched last month to coincide with the start of Mayor Nutter’s second term.

Aside from a cleaner, more appealing look, the biggest improvements to the site are the navigation — designed to be more user centric — and the new ‘Topics’ section,  Adel Ebeid, Chief Innovation Officer for the City told Technically Philly. Ebeid said these updates are intended “to demystify the workings of the city and puts it in a form that city constituents can understand.”

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Phila.gov/business launches phase two, featuring ‘Business Assistant’ wizard

Mayor Nutter unveils the next rollout of Phila.gov/business Thursday at the Community College of Philadelphia. Photo courtesy of Kait Privitera.

Mayor Nutter officially unveiled Thursday phase two of an effort to overhaul the business services portal on Phila.gov.

If you’re surprised by the continued development of Phila.gov/business ahead of an on-going site-wide redesign effort, then you might also marvel at the fact that the project landed on time from an internal deadline Technically Philly reported on in June, despite the start and stop of the overall Phila.gov refresh.

Visit the new business portal here: Phila.gov/business.

The city is trumpeting the ‘Business Assistant’ wizard, which is meant to walk new businesses through the online process of meeting city license and compliance requirements. Additional web access to permits and applications was another big goal for the project. In September, the wizard soft launched and, since then, some 720 users have registered and half have sought information on business, a press release said.

How widely used the portal will be will test the effort’s success. This multi-agency effort lands as other portions of Phila.gov are being recast. Internal deadlines for that project have varied.

Phila.gov business services portal to add 75% of licenses and permit applications online by 2012, interactivity

Before its second birthday in November, the City of Philadelphia’s Business Services Center website will add more interactivity and have the majority of licenses and permits available, officials tell Technically Philly.

“The portal was the first step in the overhaul of Phila.gov, collecting and sharing all business-related information for business users, rather than asking them to hunt through multiple departmental sites to get what they need,” said Sara Merriman, the director of policy initiatives for the city’s Department of Commerce.

The next release of the portal, internally scheduled for late summer, will include three major ‘interactive’ features: (1) a wizard tool to help direct businesses to the licenses they may need, (2) a wizard output into a dashboard that users can save and return to as they work through their tasks and (3) a business registration feature that will in future releases be used as the basis for further interactivity like online permit delivery and payment tracking, Merriman said.

In addition to the added interactivity, by the end of 2011, the portal is planned to house most city license and permit applications.

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TicketLeap and Social Media, a match made in heaven

In the highly competitive world of online ticketing, it’s often the little things that set a company apart.

This is no news to Chris Stanchak, CEO of the rapidly growing Philly-based ticketer TicketLeap.

When he founded TicketLeap in 2003 as a student project, Stanchak had a vision of providing professional-grade ticketing for events too small to attract the attention of ticketing giants such as Ticketmaster.

Since then, the company has saved bicycling in Philadelphia, raised capital and has completed a drastic redesign of the company’s homepage and changed its business philosophy.

“Before [the redesign] we were focused on being a destination site for people trying to find tickets to events near them,” says Stanchak. “But with everything happening in social media, the idea of a destination event website is kind of going away.”

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Mason and Megan Wendell: from indie record execs to husband-wife branding and design Drupal team

Seems like ditching the record label for the branding and design firm was the right way to go.

Mason and Megan Wendell, the husband-wife team behind Mount Airy-based Canary Promotion + Design, met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“We started our own record label (Solarmanite Records) to release our own music and some other artists, and more and more bands started coming to us for advice on everything from how to publicize a release to how to get a barcode,” says Megan, 35, who handles the marketing side of the firm.

So they started a business doing just that outside of New York City, where she was working for a dotcom and Mason was handling Web work on Wall Street. By early 2002, the duo moved to Philadelphia and found a niche in the region’s arts and culture community.

Now they have a heavy hand in the look and feel of the Philly arts scene and open source content management system Drupal is their tool of choice.

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Shop Talk: Obama Girl’s Leah Kauffman on Phrequency.com redesign

Updated: 5:33 p.m. 6/10/09 with additional attribution

This is part of an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

On a Friday afternoon in early May, Leah Kauffman dons a t-shirt to show off her gang affiliation.

A pair of hands screenprinted on the bright red tee are positioned similarly to the Bloods street gang hand signal. Fingers on the right hand are contorted into the shape of the letters ‘b,’ ‘l’ and ‘o.’ The left hand is flipped upside-down, and the index finger curled, creating a hanging “g.”

‘Blog,’ it reads.

At first glance, it’s easy to miss. But it makes sense. Kauffman runs Philly.com’s Phrequency, a news portal that covers the movers, shakers and rattlers of Philly’s music community.

In April, Phrequency was redesigned with a more streamlined, blog-esque interface; dropping the clunky, genre focus that forced users to choose hip-hop or punk, R&B or jazz, for a content-oriented design that doesn’t split hairs on artists who span all of those.

It was a move that Kauffman had wanted to make for months.
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Shop Talk: Daniel Delaney of Vendr.TV

Daniel Delaney is sorry.

He just finished a bit of a rant about how zoning laws that govern where street vendors can do business are putting a stranglehold on Philadelphia’s food cart culture, and seemed startled when I said I assumed he was now based in New York.

“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” he says. “I just look at this stuff a bit scientifically.”

Indeed, Delaney, 23, is taking his food very seriously since launching in February Vendr.TV, a weekly podcast devoted to finding the best-tasting street food in the world. It was just picked up by a network funder, Delaney says, though he can’t yet disclose who.

While the University of the Arts alumnus has made that not uncommon trek up the Jersey Turnpike and his podcast’s stock is on the rise, he might have reason to remember where he first got his taste for food entertainment.

Read what goes into Vendr.TV and how he says our great food city could become a great street food city, too, after the jump.

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Shop Talk: Philadelphia Weekly redesign with Keith McGinnis of Review Publishing

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.”

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