A New Home Page (by John Craig)

The PittsburghToday Web site has significantly changed its home page to two purposes.  First, we have established a new Region's Forum that will be updated regularly to give more prominence to differences of opinion about the appropriateness of public policy initiatives and particular regional indicators.

The Forum will solicit contributions from individuals and institutions with a bias for material dealing with local issues and appropriateness of data choices driving the site's many indicators.   Signed comment from readers and visitors to the site will be very welcome and posted in order to promote a robust dialogue.

Second, "A View of Our Region" has been established to drive home the truth that Pittsburgh is larger and more rich in its many parts than is often understood. This portfolio of images will lead the home page and change regularly to capture the seasonal and social variety of the region. 

This new centerpiece of our homepage uses photography and graphic material to promote the concept of one multi-county, multi-state, regional city called Pittsburgh. Five organizations have been recruited initially to provide leadership in photo collecton; individuals also are contributing to the project.

Images are organized initially in clusters of seven and rotated continuously.  A "Where is it?" link atop each image,  when clicked, calls up a map of the 22-county Pittsburgh region that identifies the county from which the image comes.  This map page also contains information about the subject of the photograph, the photographer and the organization with which the photographer is associated.  The goal is both to call attention to the different places and people that make up Pittsburgh as well as to the contributing organizatons themselves.

Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, the Port of Pittsburgh, the Riverlife Task Force and the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area are the five initial project partners, with others being recruited.  The goal is a portfolio of photography and graphics from all 22 counties in the region, with enough material from each county to accommodate several changes in both the seasons and the news.

Comments

[Christopher Hoenig]

John,

Hope this finds you well. Your site is looking great, and I just wanted to pass along – as promised – a final copy of our brochure. You can download it from our new site – http://www.stateoftheusa.org.

Warmest Regards,

Chris Hoenig
President and Chief Executive Officer
The State of the USA

[Alfred Blumstein, Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research and former Dean of the Heinz School]

John, I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I think you Web site is terrific. The opportunity to review materials at
3 or 4 levels of detail is very helpful and is just what a Web site should allow one to do, but very few do.

Two quick thoughts that might be helpful. On your comparison chart with the dots (Pgh now, last year, US, benchmarks), it would be helpful if there were some measure of scale so one could know whether the differences are small or large.

The other is a minor technical one: on the housing price appreciation, the bar charts show the difference is percentages, whereas the data tables say they are in percentages, but the numbers are in fractions (i.e., if the percent change is 4%, the value is presented as 0.04).

Good luck for continued improvement.

Al

[Rudolph H. Weingartner, Chair of the Arts Committee]

This is huge progress for the PittsburghToday website. With, on the one hand, such great improvements and, on the other, greater publicity in the region, the Pittsburgh Indicator Project should, before long, become a NECESSARY resource for anyone interested in the thriving of the Pittsburgh region.

[Bill Peduto]

Happy new year. I enjoy your site and find the information useful. Please consider linking to our site http://www.reformpittsburghnow.com