The piazza at schmidt's

Our Back Stage Pass

The Piazza at Schmidts, a new 80,000 square ft open air retail and event space in Northern Liberties, was one of the most anticipated development projects in Philadelphia. It was developed by Tower Investments and was built as an important piece in the overall vision Bart Blatstein had for the area. Considering the fact that our Philadelphia web design company is located in the Tower and connected to the space (our windows literally line the back wall of the event stage) we had personal pride and stake in the project's success.

We also endured several months of
severe construction…so we're also
pretty psyched that it's finally
done. Although being so close
to the development enabled us
to live through the discovery
process over the course of a few
years as the project was being built.
Being so close to it allowed us to get
a truer sense of the impact something
like this has on the area, and our
business as well.

la dolce vita

The Piazza is about daily events, artists and retailer spotlights, community gatherings, and, living the good life of course. So with the daily dose of events that visitors have to check out, we developed the site with a seamless user experience as our focus. We used AJAX to create actions on the home page that could be done without loading a new page…like the newsletter sign up for example . We designed the site off the Piazza’s existing branding, reinforcing the color scheme and the Piazza’s signature pavers. Overall though, our goal was to create a clean site that was not over designed, emphasizing the images that highlight the vendors, and the listings that highlight the event space.

We also custom built several components for the project including a listing and event manager and multi-media manager. Since the scope of the project, and their needs, were so unique, we developed custom tools in their content management system that will make their lives easier and make the user experience more fluid.

All Along the Watch: "Tower"

The final piece to the development puzzle was to develop the site for Tower Investments as well. We designed something a little more unique and dramatic for the Tower site, while still allowing the property shots to gain most of the focus. The cloud background we created was a thematic choice that was aligned with the open air, Italian naming that Tower uses for a majority of their properties. In order to launch the site at the same time as the opening of the Piazza at Schmidts and the Piazza website launch we cranked up our efforts and worked through weekends to accomplish the task.