Client
Visitor Center and Business Improvement District in New York’s vibrant and rapidly growing neighborhood, the Lower East Side (LES).
Challenges
The Lower East Side (LES) is New York City’s hottest up and coming neighborhood, home to a diverse history and a growing collection of independent shops, bars and restaurants. In NYC each neighborhood has a website, which is it’s central point of communication for promotions, projects, history and local resources. LES needed to transform their outdated WordPress website containing hundreds of different pages and custom templates into a streamlined and robust system capable of handling their diverse set requirements. The site would need to organize a host of crucial elements including a local business directory, mobile video and audio tours, and city resources.
Design
Designing the new digital home for one of New York City’s trendiest neighborhoods required transforming the visions from a group of tastemaker all with a vested interest in the project into a unified design, look and feel. Out of a storm of ideas emerged a contemporary down to earth style with a mobile forward user experience design. The city block inspired tile homepage layout creates virtual gateways into the many pockets and corners of the Lower East Side, while stacking and aligning neatly when viewed on mobile devices. Their existing brand identity was updated into a web friendly style kit with flat ui style colors and icons. Through this design process, we created a user experience that sets a new standard for visitor center websites throughout New York City and worldwide.
Development
By the time we had completed coding, we had developed a state of the art travel and information portal website tailored for both tourists and neighborhood business owners alike.
The business directory is the heart of the site, featuring a responsive web design fully optimized for mobile browsing and integration with Google maps. This allows tourists to explore the best of the Lower East Side by reading editorial content, watching videos, getting directions and planning their visit right from their phone.
All of the locations in the business directory are linked to the video library and events calendar. If there is a video or an event for a specific location, a connection will appear on the respective business directory page. A self-guided mobile audio tour highlights the site’s strong mobile functionality and cross platform compatibility without the costly need for device-specific mobile applications.
A micro-site for the Essex Street Market includes a vendor directory with video profiles of each vendor, all produced by DigiMix. The lowereastside.org homepage now has multiple dynamic content areas, including an automated hours of operation widget for the visitor center, automatically rotating featured business widgets and an Instagram photo stream.
Results
The successful launch of LowerEastSide.org met all the requirements and achieved all of the organizational goals that Digimix was asked for by the LES BID. Additionally, LowerEastSide.org has been consider arguably the most visibly engaging and content-rich website for any of the business improvement district websites in New York City. The site’s clean look and management of content provide an exceptional user experience.
Neighborhood business owners are very pleased to have a valuable new resource for their city business management. Visitors to the Lower East Side have an exciting new digital travel guide to help them explore Manhattan’s most up and coming neighborhood.
