The City of Big Shoulders is also the city of big business. The home of over 250 corporate headquarters, including 29 from the Fortune 500, Chicago's diverse economy fosters innovative start-ups, established multi-national corporations, and manufacturing powerhouses, as well as over 1,500 foreign firms that have a presence in the Chicago area. World Business Chicago is a not-for-profit economic development corporation chaired by Mayor Richard M. Daley that works to promote Chicago as the ultimate global business destination.

World Business Chicago works with companies to provide them with the resources and information they need to do business in the Windy City, helping to enhance the local economy and build the best city in the world in which to live, work, and play. Global brands such as Boeing and Google have flourished in the Chicago market thanks to the assistance provided by World Business Chicago.

As the organization responsible for coordinating the city's business retention and attraction efforts, World Business Chicago needed a powerful Web site that would promote the city and provide a peerless resource for the Chicago business community.

In the business world, making a good first impression is crucial. Palantir's user experience team meticulously crafted the look-and-feel of the World Business Chicago site through imagery, iconography, and typography to maintain an engaging tone designed to appeal to a variety of different professional audiences. The site is built using the open source content management platform Drupal, which provided the flexibility necessary to build a site that not only looks good on the surface, but also provides sophisticated functionality custom-tailored to meet the needs of WBC and its global audience.

For those decision-makers who don't deal with business metrics on a daily basis, and are just interested in learning more about the city and why it's such a great place to live and work, the site highlights Chicago business success stories, embedded videos, and photo galleries of the city's soaring architecture and magnificent lakeshore. Drupal's Panels module gives WBC the ability to make changes to the layout of their site without having to touch any code or worry about about breaking the design.

Meanwhile, the hard data contained within the site is just a few clicks away, making it easy for users to access WBC's wealth of research and statistics on Chicago's economy, key industries, and other demographic information. Links throughout the site provide a direct path to the files where this data is stored. Palantir included navigation buttons for these files on the right side of the site, which are broken up by category using taxonomy provided through Drupal.

Information about how foreign businesses can contact WBC to find out how the organization can help their companies do business in Chicago is provided in several languages, including Chinese, French, German, and Japanese.

The landscape of the Chicago business community is constantly growing and evolving. World Business Chicago now has a site that is robust and dynamic as the city itself. Its intuitive layout combined with its vast reservoir of information makes it powerful tool for visitors and administrators alike.