The "Well-heeled" MDC? You gotta love that headline.
Just now getting to this article from 04/24/2010. That is not what I would call a friendly headline.
But it is certainly not an inaccurate one.
There are several interesting things in the article but the one that really stood out was this:
Altogether, records indicate $36,492 in LiveMidland-related costs during the fiscal year.Reporter-Telegram reports from 2008 showed the MDC spent an estimated $75,000 for the LiveMidland's site design and launch party.
Over $100,000 in the past couple of years for this.
Over. One. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.
The design of the site is original and good design does cost some money. But I am guessing that the rest of the site is founded on cheap (or even free) pre-written scripts and modules.
In comparison, this site was designed for free by the Site Admin, runs on a set of scripts from MovableType which cost all of about $100. And costs a whopping $30 per month in hosting fees.
I really, really would like to see what it was that cost $36,492.
Any of you local web designers....excuse me...I mean local web designers passed up for this juicy gig...want to take a shot at determining the precise brand and cost of these pre-written scripts and get back to us?
UPDATE: It looks to be a WordPress driven site, unless I am mistaken. WordPress is a competing product with MovableType and is a really great set of scripts to use to operate a web site. (Thanks TJ for the Tip.)
And also happens to be...um...*cough* free.
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7 Comments
Walsingham is back. Which means that Otto will have a spicy rum hangover in the morning.
The last WordPress-powered website -- creating a custom theme -- I did for a client cost him less than $2,000...and even that was because he changed the scope of the site considerably in mid-stream.
WordPress is ridiculously easy to customize and configure, especially considering its flexibility and power.
First thing I would do if I were running LiveMidlandTexas.com is to combine all of the separate blogs into a single blog with multiple authors. Much easier to keep fresh content that way.
Complaining is often said to be easy, but steady blogging very much isn't. Case in point.
Second thing I'd do is a line item review of website related expenses done with the help of a hired local web designer (like Eric). Maybe hired as a consultant with the express condition that they will not end up with the maintenance contract so there would be no conflict of interest.
And kill the Cafe Live forums. No forum at all is better than one in which the last post was made in October of 2009.
I am thrilled the Walser is back .I am not too sure the painful burning in my back side is a condition of spicy rum but I keep my PC as far from electric outlets as possibl and wash my hands a lot..ALOT !
Got the team together . God Bless and kick ass !~
Maybe it wasn't all spent on the website design itself. Maybe there were costs associated that weren't directly related to the actually creation and running of the website. You need to dig deeper. The cost of some wordpress webpages may not be where all of the money went. There is significant waste, but you are looking under the wrong stones.
Existence of the wp-login.php page pretty much confirms that it is a WordPress site.