AMMAN, October 7, 2009. As the Jordanian Capital Amman celebrates 100 years since the establishment of its municipality, SYNTAX, the multidisciplinary branding and design company, has launched the full edition of the official web-site of the Centennial Celebrations of the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM). The interactive website’s highlight is an invitation to all citizens of Amman to tell their part of Amman‘s story of diversity and to participate in a multitude of Centennial festivities that will be announced on the site.

An illustrated history of Amman and its municipality is presented on the site with an emphasis on the late 19th and the 20th Century, the time during which Amman grew from a small village, where the early Circassian immigrants coexisted with Arab tribes, to a new Arab town that brought together people from all over the region and that became the Hashemite choice for the capital of Jordan, and the aspiring global metropolis of today. The bi-lingual website can be found at www.ammancity100.gov.jo.

As 2009 marks the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of a city administration in Amman, the Greater Amman Municipality had decided to create a web hub for the various festivities, concerts and activities that are taking place throughout this year. SYNTAX has provided GAM with a progressive web solution that enables users to upload their personal memories and stories to the website and interact with each other by discussing history, books and events in Amman. SYNTAX developed the user experience, the visual design and the content of the website. Spring Web Technologies, a sister company of SYNTAX, developed the site’s content management solution, based on open-source web technologies.

Earlier in 2009, SYNTAX had delivered to GAM the new guidelines for the Amman Brand, which SYNTAX has been working on for over a year, as the city embarked on its first comprehensive, citizen-centric branding exercise.

“Amman‘s history has mainly been told from the ancient perspective. The story of the current inhabitants which resulted in today‘s reality and diversity has mostly gone untold. Amman’s new brand is all about emphasizing the Amman that we, our parents and our grandparents built,” said Ahmad Humeid, CEO of SYNTAX.
“Emphasizing the modern history in a pluralistic narrative shows GAM‘s progressive understanding of administering the city and serving its citizens. SYNTAX assisted GAM to accomplish its vision by creating this web platform. Our work on this project reflects our understanding of the local Ammani context, which enabled us to contribute the actual content of this site,“ explained Humeid.

SYNTAX has long been a web pioneer in the Arab world and beyond, having contributed to building the region’s first online portals, corporate websites and e-commerce applications, beginning in the mid 1990s. Websites and online presences for HM Queen Rania of Jordan in 2000, followed by innovative customer centric site for telecom companies such as Fastlink (now Zain) and Jordan Telecom and, more recently, the web 2.0 career network Akhtaboot.com have established SYNTAX as one of the region’s leading web innovators. Recent web projects include the official website for the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar and a campaign site for Coca Cola Middle East.