When Amazon announced it was seeking proposals for a second headquarters in September of 2017, cities all across North America took up the challenge. The City of Philadelphia, through the coordinated leadership of the City’s Department of Commerce and its public-private economic development corporation known as PIDC, began an intensive process to respond to the proposal by the October 19, 2017 deadline.
A key component of Philadelphia’s effort would be a website that would support and reinforce the written response. The response team selected The Tactile Group to design and develop the website. Several other companies, including Azavea, Interface Studio, Leveler Media, and Skai Blue Media, as well as a writing team from the City and PIDC, developed the site content.
With an extremely aggressive timeline of just three weeks, and content that was being developed at the same time, Tactile designed and deployed an elegant, flexible site. The content included video and interactive data maps along with text, static imagery, and PDF attachments. Midway through the process, the City decided it needed to have two versions of the site: the original password-protected version to be sent to Amazon, and a public version with minor content changes that could be viewed by the general public.
Tactile built and launched two versions of the website that are beautiful, engaging, and showcase Philadelphia as the perfect candidate for Amazon’s next headquarters.
The original Amazon-specific sites were eventually altered to highlight Philadelphia as the perfect candidate for all business in the region.
