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Annesha Taylor has short hair and is seated with a bright floral dress.

She’s speaking into a camera about her first reaction to finding she had become one of the 28,000 HIV-positive people living in tropical Jamaica.

“How was I going to tell my mother? The best way,” she pauses there, “is if I killed myself.”

It’s unsettling in all the worst ways. But it’s also a way to personalize the AIDS struggle on the Caribbean island, which now has one of the highest rates in the world outside the African continent.

Partnering with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and D.C.-based Joshua Cogan, design firm bluecadet interactive, newly based in the loathsomely-named Art Museum area, helped tell the stories of Taylor and others and package them on Live Hope Love.

They hope to have helped bring attention to the ongoing battle, led by South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes. While surely not they’re only end goal, bluecadet has won praise and honors.

Add another: bluecadet interactive was nominated for two Webby Awards, winning a People’s Voice nod in one, the company announced late last month.

See what got them the win, how bluecadet got the work and what’s up next, after the jump.

Founder and principal Josh Goldblum hasn’t bought his tickets just yet for the 13th annual event to be held June 8 in New York City, but he’ll be able to collect the People’s Voice Winner in the Web site Art category and hear his firm’s nomination for Best Use of Photography on a Web site.

Both nominations came for Live Hope Love.

“I think it’s important that we got the people’s choice award,” Goldblum says. “The type of site we do, there’s not that many examples. This is real interactive journalism at a time when people are looking for what’s next in news coverage. The people’s choice award shows there’s a demand for it.”

See other examples of their interactive Web news work here. Earlier this year they won the Best Music Site award at South by Southwest, among others honors.

The Live Hope Love project was a collection of minds. In 2007, the Virginia Quarterly was partnering with the Pulitzer Center to work with poet Dawes. They wanted a way to create a significant Web presence to capture the gripping account of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, using Dawes’s poetry all to be couched with an essay Dawes wrote for the quarterly’s spring 2008 issue.

Goldblum, who still had bluecadet based in D.C. and was well connected there, was a natural fit. At the end of 2007, Goldblum and friend and photographer Grogan trailed Davis to Jamaica, beginning with Kingston.

“We were gaining the trust of these people, finding what poems really illustrated these stories,” he says.

They collected video interviews, narration from Dawes — recorded at a South Carolina radio station — and graphic photographs. It launched and not much happened at first.

“There wasn’t a real big corporation supporting this, so there wasn’t a lot of immediate traffic,” Golblum says. “But then we got attention from the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, and then the awards came.”

Like being the only Philadelphia-based firm nominated at this year’s Webby’s.

Last year, Goldblum moved bluecadet to Philadelphia, nearer to friends, family and his native Willow Grove. His firm is already working with the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge and the University of Pennsylvania.

Other clients, from Philadelphia and nationally, are sure to follow.

But Live Hope Love and the attention it brought to the plight of people like Annesha Taylor isn’t something to forget.

“I’m proud of that. It’s growth was organic.” Goldblum says. “It’s that power of the Web.”

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.

Somebody please figure out this city’s budget shortfall so we can go back to prospering.

It can be Mayor Michael Nutter or city council or, Hell, maybe Larry West.

Maybe you can figure it out with a new, very cool online toy from the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, the research and analysis nonprofit based on the Avenue of the Arts.

At EconomyLeague.com/Budget, users get a snapshot of the budget battle, by having to close a $200 million hole with 15 options.

“Through the Philadelphia Budget Challenge as well as the Mayor’s budget forums in February, citizens are getting a look behind the curtain at the real trade-offs city managers have to make,” said Allison Kelsey, a spokeswoman for the Economy League. “It makes for better-informed constituents and voters who can then be better advocates for themselves, their neighborhoods and their city.”

See what went into the project, read how I fared and share your own choices below.

Since its March 23 launch, some 2,000 people have taken the challenge, which was funded by West Conshohocken’s Lenfest Foundation, Kelsey told Technically Philly.

Steven Wray, the Economy League executive director, called the online tool a three-way exercise.

“To help people learn more about the city budget, and the second part was to make that learning experience fun, and then finally to also be able to collect some information about the choices people make,” Wray told KYW.

So the game, which focuses on short-term choices, might lack a bit of nuance for budget geeks out there, but a great deal of learning is to be had there.

The Economy League is sharing their results, suggesting the administration might take those perspectives into consideration — something it seems they surprisingly did do after those citizen workshops.

Kelsey said she doesn’t know if the mayor gave the online tool a go.

“Most Philadelphians are unaware of how much of the city’s total budget is already spent before the mayor and council have their say,” Kelsey said, directing users to see its breakdown of how the city used its $3.9 billion budget, which is seen below, and also how the city generated its revenue last fiscal year.

The Economy League hopes to update the tool annually, keeping choices nuanced and situation-based as the times change, Kelsey said.

The challenge has made a bit of a splash, in addition to outlets around town, the tool has gotten attention across the pond, too. It breaks our tiny TP heart, though, that not a single Philly tech head had a hand in the design of the challenge, according to the Economy League press release:

The Economy League licensed the prototype from Next 10, a Palo Alto organization that in 2005 created its “California Budget Challenge” to engage more Californians in the budget process. The original software was developed by Red Hill Studios, and additional development for the Philadelphia Budget Challenge was created by Rock River Star, Downingtown, PA. [Source]

The century-old Economy League offers a host of fascinating documents to help inform yourself on the process, including its budget roadmap. See the mayor’s five-year budget plan.

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[I couldn't help but share my choices, which still left the city $5.1 million over budget -- so maybe I'd go after the Eagles. This also serves some transparency into my view of the city structure.

I didn't touch the city's wage, sales and business privilege taxes -- doing otherwise feels far, far more dangerous than other proposals. I increased slightly real estate and amusement taxes and trimmed spending for the city's library spending and office of supportive housing.

I really didn't want to touch prison funding because we know the fist programs to go are the most helpful -- job training and the like -- but I did. Hoping to take seriously the politics involved in a budget proposal, I didn't touch police and fire department spending, though I did seek for a  reassessment of the city's pension fund.

My big cuts were 20 percent dips into the city's administrative and licenses & inspections departments and a big fat 30 percent slash of the city's fleet management (city employees should be using SEPTA, period.)

So, how did you fare?]