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I-SITE’s “Downtown NYC” App Featured in Meetings Focus Magazine

This month, the second version of our mobile app for The Alliance for Downtown New York was featured in the East edition of Meetings Focus Magazine. The magazine, which is geared toward meeting professionals of the East Coast highlight the app in their Short Takes section.

The app is the most in depth mobile resource for ‘where to go’ and ‘what to do’ in Lower Manhattan. Created for residents, businesses and visitors, Version 2.0 adds in detailed information on all of Lower Manhattan’s renowned cultural institutions, retailers, restaurants, hotels, meeting spaces and more.

New features of the app include:

New ‘Where To Go’ section featuring shopping, dining information and hotels
Daily cultural, community, and culinary events
Location maps featuring ‘Get Directions’
‘My Favorites’ feature, allowing you to mark your favorite events and locations to save for later
New search functionality for searching events or locations
Special events and holiday highlights
Alerts i.e., street closings

“Everyone spending time in Lower Manhattan – whether visiting South Street Seaport, the 9/11 Memorial or Stone Street for a drink – should download this app,” says I-SITE CEO Ian Cross. “With Downtown Alliance’s great data and the intuitive design we created, we think the app is a great tool not just for visitors, but also for the growing number of residents and businesses that call Lower Manhattan home.”

Download the app for iPhone from the Apple’s iTunes store.

I-SITE’s Olympic Spirit Continues

With the Olympics coming to a close, I-SITE wanted to get in on some of the action, in our own way. Since foosball, beer and coding are more our game than running long distance or gymnastics we thought a challenging game of darts would be appropriate! Team USA.

I-SITE’s Olympic Evening

This Wednesday, I-SITE members, Ian Cross and Kara Bergman headed down to 11th & Callowhill for the Brit Invasion: Olympic Happy Hour hosted by The British American Business Council of Greater Philadelphia at our very own Trestle Inn. During this summer networking event, guests were able to enjoy top tier Whiskey and beer selections, bar snacks and networking with friends and colleagues while viewing the London 2012 Summer Games.

Ian, who is owner of The Trestle Inn, as well as BABC Marketing & Communications Chair to the BABC was pleased to see over 50 guests filling the front and back rooms, cheering on the US and UK athletes as Olympic coverage was projected onto the back wall of The Trestle’s private back room. Guests stayed well after the happy hour time frame to continue to enjoy the atmosphere and delicious whiskey sours! View more photos from this event here.

I-SITE CEO and owner of The Trestle Inn, Ian Cross with Karin Copeland, Executive Director of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Philadelphia.

BABC Executive Director, Jane Rosenberg welcomes the crowd.

Crow A Go Go: I-SITE Team Building

To kick off summer, I-SITE embarked on a team building experience involving a large poster board, a very special crow and a few whiskey sours.

While continuing to brand The Trestle Inn, I-SITE designer Dana Pavlichco created a piece that would amp up the outdoor board along the Callowhill Street of our favorite Whiskey and Go Go Lounge. The idea came from the faux crow who peers down on patrons from atop the mahogany bar inside The Trestle Inn. We decided his story needed to be told. While sketching “the oldest patron of The Trestle Inn”, she added a few accessories to prove his love for the bar’s fringe entertainment. The bright red go go boots and sunglasses gave him a summer look that reflected The Trestle’s ambiance, while creating an interesting and fun image outside the bar.

Dana then tiled her design into five rows of 11×17 posters, and working together we brought the crow to life by pasting him on top of the board. An hour and a half plus a pitcher of whiskey sours later, he was complete!

Be sure to visit The Trestle Inn at 11th & Callowhill to keep up with his ever changing Go Go wear.

Happy Friday the 13th from I-SITE

Chris telling ghost stories to the rest of the I-SITE crew.

I-SITE FEATURED IN PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

I-SITE was recently featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s article titled Geeks Gather on N3RD Street written by Jane M. Von Bergen. The article is about the 21 tech businesses based in Old City Philadelphia. I-SITE has been based in Old City on 3rd Street since the mid-1990s. The tech firms on N3RD Street have many things in common, but one thing in particular is their collaborative nature. With so many companies and people interested and working on similar things, it’s easy to share resources and deliver quality products.

I-SITE’s own Ian Cross was also featured in a photo for the article holding the puffin that symbolizes the Puffin Cup, which is a charity soccer match founded by Ian between Old City businesses . Check out the other companies featured in the article as well as Ian’s thoughts on the I-SITE office, neighborhood and recruiting.

Drupaldelphia Recap

This past Friday I attended Drupaldelphia, Philly’s annual Drupal meetup. The Drupal community is a network of open-source developers around the world, and regional meetups are a common way for the community to get together and talk about what’s up and coming in the world of Drupal development.

Held at Temple University’s Alter Hall, the event featured a keynote address by Earl ‘Merlinofchaos’ Miles, a major figure in the Drupal development community responsible for popular tools such as Views and Panels. Miles addressed the sold-out 300-person crowd about his own experiences working on Drupal, how the content management system has grown over the years, and where it’s heading.

After the keynote, we broke out into sessions. There were 5 blocks of sessions, and in each block there were 5 different sessions occurring simultaneously, giving attendees a total of 25 sessions to choose from. Sessions were structured for a variety of different experience levels (beginner – advanced) and roles (from developers to designers and business administrators). There was something for everyone, ranging from those who had just heard of Drupal and wanted to learn what sets it apart from other solutions to developers who have been working with Drupal for years and wanted to sharpen their skills.

My first session was on “Semantic Site Building,” run by the talented Jody Hamilton of local Drupal heavyweights Zivtech (who were also a sponsor of the event). Hamilton provided examples from her years of Drupal experience, talking about the best way to name and organize the many different pieces in a Drupal site, while also sharing stories from working with other people’s sites that she was brought in to “clean up.”

From there I headed back to the main room for “The Power of Views,” presented by Ted Bowman of Six Mile Tech. He specializes in custom Drupal training, and had a detailed Powerpoint presentation followed by a live example illustrating the key concepts that he went over. Views is a powerful way to create custom feeds and lists of different types of data in Drupal. For his presentation he demonstrated setting up a smart image gallery, but the concepts could be applied to a wide array of applications.

After a quick lunch and some gossip with my fellow attendees, I went into what ended up being my favorite presentation of the day: “Infrastructure Potpourri.” Amir Tahvildaran of The Math Forum at Drexel University covered a variety of different free tools that, when orchestrated together, greatly add to the development process. He touched upon version control before going into Selenium (a browser automation tool useful in testing), Hudson (a continuous integration server solution), Nagios (a system monitoring tool), Puppet (a configuration management tool), and finally Vagrant (for setting up virtual environments). Working together, these tools give any programmer a great deal of power and valuable time-saving efficiency. And while these tools will make any Drupal project easier, they are by no means Drupal specific and have applications for many kinds of web or software development.

Howard Tyson and Jody Hamilton presenting on deployment strategies

Next up was “Deployment Strategies: Managing code, content, and configurations” again presented by Jody Hamilton and Howard Tyson of Zivtech. Tyson and Hamilton demonstrated several techniques they use at Zivtech for managing and deploying the sites they work on, and had some great recommendations for improving any team’s workflow. As they were filling in for the originally scheduled speaker who was unable to make it, their impromptu presentation was all that much more impressive.

I finished up my day with the session “Requirements & Drupal: Planning for Successful Projects,” by Jon Riekse and RJ Townsend. As a Business Analyst, Riekse’s presentation focused less on nuts-and-bolts and more on workflow and process, important considerations when planning a project. Townsend added his programming knowledge to balance the presentation and give the room all the important considerations they would need to successfully plan and execute a project.

Overall it was an exciting day of learning and networking. I spoke with developers who had traveled from New Jersey, New York City, and Washington DC to attend the event and swapped many great stories about our various experiences working on different types of projects. The community is certainly a diverse one, but we all have one thing in common: we all see a great deal of potential in Drupal and are excited as to where it’s going to take us! (as well as where we are going to take it…)

KARA BERGMAN EXPOSED

Skills:
Multi-tasking, communications, social media

Tools of the Trade:
My laptop—it goes everywhere with me.

Project most proud of:
Managing The Trestle Inn marketing and social media. The restaurant and bar business was uncharted territory for me, but after watching this unique Whiskey & Go Go bar evolve from a vacant building to a thriving entertainment venue, I’m proud to say I’ve been a part of it.

Being involved with the marketing has been an amazing learning experience that has allowed me to tap into all aspects of communication. Writing press releases about Drag Queen brunches, Facebooking & Tweeting (until I can no longer post or tweet anymore), forming relationships with the best press in Philly, and working with an amazing graphic designer is pretty much a marketer’s dream. (hotcanadianpharmacy.com) I have gained some very valuable skills from this project and cannot wait to see where we take the brand next!

Dream Project:
I think it would be really exciting to help land another big Downtown Alliance as a client of I-SITE. Similar to marketing a bar or entertainment venue, there are many layers to marketing a downtown…branding, websites, iPhone apps, social media and more.

Future technology prediction:
I think digital marketing and social business will continue to grow and change the way we communicate with one another. Businesses are realizing social media has become more of a science rather than an art form. If used in the right way, it can be extremely efficient and effective for your business.

Favorite I-SITE moment:
Creating the TURBOQUO video to send to our clients and friends over the holidays. While I hardly consider myself an actress, drinking a few beers and watching Stove put on a wizard costume was enough to keep me involved.

Social Session

When it comes to marketing through social media, both Facebook and Twitter can help you or your business accomplish the same goal – get your message out to the world and build large audiences to follow it. But, believe it or not these similar media outlets need to be approached very differently and with separate strategies.

Sure, they have similarities. They both include usernames, profile pages, status updates, photos and tagging, but when you’re ready to post your message to your audience, be careful how you approach posting if you want to reach the right audience.

Facebook pages typically post in the public feed only one or two updates every day. Your goal with Facebook should be to obtain the most likes and comments, which drive people to re-share, which will expose your message to more of their friends and followers. There is also no limit to the amount of information you post at once. You can upload videos, photos, links, and more without being cut off. This creates more of a blog atmosphere, where you can easily look back at new and old posts from one particular Facebook page at any time.

However, Twitter profiles typically post much more frequently, sending out about 10-12 tweets a day on average at only 140 characters per post. Because of this, followers are only going to see the tweets within a small timeframe after something is published. Since this tool is more time sensitive, you will want to publish as much valuable information as possible to catch your audience while they are online and reading. Hitting the right people with your tweets will also ensure that your information is re-tweeted, which will send your content out to other audiences and hopefully generate more of your own followers.

While trying to manage your Facebook and Twitter activity, HootSuite is a valuable tool to use. HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. While there is a lot of ground to cover through both of these outlets, HootSuite allows you to schedule your postings, so you can be sure to release your information at the right time in order to reach the right audience as well as providing social analytic tools for measurement.

Happy Facebooking, Tweeting, and HootSuite-ing!

Taking The Trestle Inn Mobile

These days you have to think mobile when you begin designing or redesigning your website. It’s no longer good enough for mobile to be an afterthought. Do you want to include all the content on your site? Do you want your site to have the same layout as on the desktop? Do you need to create new content that is mobile-only?

When we began planning for The Trestle Inn, a new and unique Philadelphia bar and venue owned by I-SITE’s very own Ian Cross, we set out to create a highly visual and interactive website driven by the Trestle’s unique brand and experience. While the long scrolling parallax layout for the website makes for a visually captivating desktop experience, many of the interactive features are not suited to a handheld touch screen interface. We knew we would need to create something very different for smartphones – a version of the site that would focus on what’s most important to whiskey lovers on the go.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you think about your mobile website.

Keep things simple.
When taking content from a desktop version of the site, we knew that we needed to keep the design and features simple. With mobile, you’re working with a restricted amount of screen space. The content we included needed to be easily readable and navigated from a mobile device.

Remember your audience.
When someone is using mobile, they have different goals and expect a different experience than the one they’ll get on your desktop website. But what exactly are they looking for? For The Trestle Inn mobile site, we chose key features like the calendar, menu and contact information. The audience wouldn’t be looking for The Trestle Inn’s history or press from their mobile device.

Brand consistency.
Everything that has your name on it is a brand touch-point, so it only made sense for us to match the mobile version branding to the desktop version of the site. We used elements for the mobile version that would best reflect and promote The Trestle Inn brand.

Think about user experience.
Mobile web pages load slower, so it’s best to keep pages, images and information to a minimum. We developed the mobile version of The Trestle Inn site to be one page that included all the information users would be looking for, but gave the user two different ways to navigate. Users can scroll up and down the mobile site or click icons at the top of the screen that will allow them to jump to exactly what they’re looking for.

Search Engine Optimization.
From mobile, users are finding your site by typing in the URL or clicking on a link to the site. Use an M-Dot URL. This lets Google recognize and index your mobile site separately from the desktop version.

Accessing the Internet on a mobile device is all about getting the information you want when you want it as quickly as possible. With a mobilized website, businesses gain the opportunity to instantly interact with more potential customers who are on the move – ideally in your direction. The more devices that your content is optimized for, the wider your potential reach.

Check out The Trestle Inn on your phone today and of course drop by for a jar if you’re in Philly!