Cincinnati Ohio Economic Development

CHOOSECINCY.COM TO ATTRACT NEW BUSINESS DEVELOPERS

City Launches New Website to Compete in Global Marketplace

Cincinnati, OH – The City of Cincinnati recently deployed its latest tool to attract businesses and jobs by launching its new interactive website, www.choosecincy.com. The goal of the new, customer friendly site is to provide timely information to make Cincinnati more competitive for site selectors and developers interested in doing business in Cincinnati, Ohio. The interactive site features reporting tools, mapping capabilities, search functions, and a foreign language translator to reach international audiences. Since its launch in early January, the website has surpassed over 1,000 visits from far away as France, India, Thailand, and Tanzania.

“The new website signifies a huge step forward on how we communicate with the Economic Development community as we seek new investors and bring jobs to Cincinnati,” said Interim Economic Development Director, Patrick Ewing. “This will help us to further compete in a global economy.”

The Economic Development Division focused on developing a website that was both user-friendly and useful for visitors in Cincinnati and the global marketplace, thereby increasing the number of businesses and jobs located within Cincinnati. Keeping true to the City’s mission of supporting local businesses, the ED Division selected a local Cincinnati firm, Topic Design Group to lead the website design project.

The completely custom designed site was built with robust, interactive functionality both for internal content administrators and for external audiences such as site selectors, commercial developers, etc. Highlights of the new website:

• Allows visitors to use information available on the site to create customized reports through a report builder tool entirely produced by Topic Design Group. With the report feature, users can take any content from the site, upload it to a report, and print it in a ready to go presentation. This makes it much easier for economic development professionals to share the most relevant information on Cincinnati in a professional presentation.
• Nearly all of the site’s content can be saved and later accessed, shared via an integrated email and social network distribution feature, and exported to pdf by individual users.
• The site is administered by a custom content management system that gives Economic Development complete control of its content, the ability to generate new pages dynamically, update features, post projects with online imagery, integrate RSS feeds, and so on.
• Live RSS feeds, easy user navigation and a first look at the new city branding in action.

“ED had a clear understanding of their purpose, audiences and how they wanted to communicate to them. As a result, the website that we produced visually and expressively reflects their passion for accurately portraying the City of Cincinnati and communicating its many benefits for businesses,” said Chris Witham, Managing Director and Partner of Topic Design Group. “Likewise, from the intelligence of the front and back end technologies to the simplicity of an administrator’s or visitor’s interaction with them, ED is delivering both to itself and its customers an improved online experience that will serve each well into the future.” Topic is a Marketing Services Company. Additional information about Topic can be found at www.topicdesign.com.

For optimal web experience www.choosecincy.com is best viewed in the Firefox web browser.

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MEDIA CONTACT:     Meg Olberding at meg.olberding@cincinnati-oh.gov or 513.352.5358
                                   Cheryl Besl at cbesl@topicdesign.com or 513.744.0908