Public Feedback Encouraged In Upgrade Of City Of Philadelphia Website
By Mike Dunn
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The city of Philadelphia's website is getting a makeover starting today, and officials are hoping you'll chime in with some feedback.
The city's Chief Innovation Officer Adel Abeid plans to spend the next six months designing and tweaking a top-to-bottom makeover of the official phila.gov site. The twist is that the public will have access to the work in progress, by going to alpha.phila.gov.
"This is an experimental prototype that will run alongside the official website," Abeid says. "And the reason for doing it that way is that we can continuously get feedback from our neighbors and residents on what else we can do to the site to make it more informative for them."
He says every page of the test site will have a feedback option at the bottom. Every two weeks a new prototype of alpha.phila.gov will be unveiled based on that feedback, until Abeid is satisfied that it is ready to replace the current official site.
"This is a very new approach for us," Abeid says. "Rather than making assumptions about what people want to see, and designing it behind closed doors, we're actually designing it as we go along."
Abeid is using an in-house staff of four -- including two new hires -- to design and implement the upgrade. He hopes to have the makeover complete by next spring.
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