The Architecture Changes

The PittsburghToday web site has undergone significant modification to reduce the number of steps the visitor must take to get to the data and interactive charts for specific indicators. The length of annotations and other explanatory material also have been reduced to facilitate easier movement within the site. Finally, wherever possible, headline text and length have been shortened.

One clear message in the year and a half that the site has been operating is that visitors have not been utilizing the graphs and data – not through disinterest but because they did not realize they were there. Many first-time visitors were clicking on an indicator, reading the summary card and leaving it at that. A different but equally vexing problem was the time it took to move from one indicator to another in the same subject area as, for example, between 2007 manufacturing job totals and 2007 information jobs totals. That has been a four-click process; it now requires on two clicks.

The time saved may seem small in this example but its cumulative effect was daunting. There are 34 different indicators in the Job Growth category in the Economy section and each has eight separate interactive charts available. Cutting in half the time to make all those visits if someone were actually inclined to do so is an obvious benefit of the new structure.

While talking numbers, it is notable that there are now 260 indicators on the pittsburghtoday web site. There are also special reports on the structural deficits of many of the 551 Pennsylvania municipalities in the Pittsburgh region; hourly air quality readings and maps; and regional demographic data that was produced as part of our 2006 arts polling. These data and commentary can be found, respectively, in Governments, Environment and Arts.

If you have any questions or comments about the site, please submit them using the form below. We'd also appreciate any suggestions you may have regarding additional indicators we should be pursuing.