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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Philly Homegrown: GPTMC unveils new look food site and campaign by Maskar Design

You, the proud and savvy Philadelphian, might get more out of the new food site from the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. than, well, you know, tourists. And that would make for one hell of a strategy.

The updated VisitPhilly.com/food, unveiled this month, is now caught up to last year’s overall GPTMC rebranding campaign that was heavy in big photos, colorful serif fonts and a deluge of deep Philly strains. Understand, this new food site focuses on GPTMC’s new Philly Homegrown campaign, one the celebrates a rich food world and, seriously, doesn’t feel the necessity to use the c-word (cheesesteak).

Built and themed by Rittenhouse design shop Maskar Design, whom we highlighted this month, the Philly Homegrown initiative has a food-driven blog, a content-heavy Facebook page and a monthly newsletter (email phillyhomegrown@visitphilly.com).

In truth, there may be just too many directions here for an average tourist to not feel overwhelmed and come short of action. But, Technically Philly might suggest, if more proud and savvy Philadelphians were exposed to more of our rich and culturally significant food culture, then they may be the best messengers to go out in the world and celebrate our food, without ever needing to use the c-word.

Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. launches brand new VisitPhilly.com

Update here

The Philadelphia region’s most powerful cheerleader will unveil a sleek new Web presence and re-branding effort today.

At a Center City hotel this morning, the primary online home of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. will be recast as VisitPhilly.com, which is dominated by big photos and better integration of other content. This fifth redesign for GPTMC is also their first step away from their 13-year-old GoPhila.com. GoPhila.com now redirects to VisitPhilly.com.

The new design, led by Web design firm Happy Cog East with offices in Center City, features a cleaner navigation with more interactive drop-down bars, a trend in development moving away from the more cluttered, screen-wide top navigation bar the last iteration GPTMC had.

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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: 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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