www.visitphilly.com
Visitphilly.com is the Official visitor website for Philadelphia travel and tourism information. The site is a showcase of things to do in Phillidelphia including museums, restaurants, tours, nightlife and much more.
The site was originally launched in 1997 but has recently been redesigned by Happy Cog – a large design and user experience agency who have offices in New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
The redesign of visitphilly sticks out to me as being an example of great design for the web – The site is instantly appealing to the eye whilst also being clean and easy to navigate.
I have highlighted some areas of the homepage that highlight the design effort:
- The large logo along with the slogan stands out on the opaque background straight away – giving a strong brand identity and leaving no doubt what purpose the website serves.
- The bold title tag laid over a white background makes for easy reading and gets the point across effectively.
- Bright full pages images on slow rotation (using Javascript rather than flash) giving the site a colourful feel and helps focus the visitors attention.
- Bold sub titles precede clean and easy to follow paragraphs making the site easy to browse through with out overloading the user with information.
- The information rich drop-down menus mean that on first inspection the site is clean and un-cluttered – with simple top level menus – Things to do, Plan your visit and Philly now. When you hover over a menu, you get an in depth sub menu ordered in a way that makes finding what you want easy.
- A simple online booking form for hotels, flights, car hire and tickets is another resource that makes these tasks extremely easy and user friendly.
Compared to the old Visit Philly website, the new site is a much more user friendly experience and shows off a dynamic and fun portal to Philadelphia.
For more information on the desgin process behind visitphilly.com, visit Happy Cog.
Website Statistics
PageRank: 6
Alexa Traffic Rank: 77,808
Alexa Traffic Rank (US): 24,809
Nibbler Sitescore: 7.5
Encoding: : XHTML 1.0 Strict – Valid
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