I was about to go on a rant but then I did an internet search. Apparently a few years ago Vancouver spent 3 million redesigning their website. It still seems excessive to me.

Unless you have your own in house IT department who can do the work that amount while it seems exhorbulent is actually pretty close to standard pricing for an outside entity to do the work

Like it or not this is the cost of doing business when upgrading and updating websites in today’s world

‘Like it or not this is the cost of doing business when upgrading and updating websites in today’s world’ – No it isn’t, don’t buy into the hype. It shouldn’t cost near this. I’ve been involved in some enormous projects, even worked with 2Advanced studios which is one of the most expensive… and I’ve never seen prices like this.

Would be good to find out what the websites from some of the other municipalities look like, then we will see what we are paying for!

Let’s be honest here, we don’t know what was in the proposal, not too mention companies always increase their price 15% for municipalities, just cause they can.

While this price may seem high to some, the City uses an antiquated system for all their internal proceedings which must connect with their site, thus, their site must use these antiquated technologies. Companies charge more to use old tech because it’s annoying. Really annoying. There is a reason only one local company bid, no one likes using these old systems.

“Let’s be honest here, we don’t know what was in the proposal”

And therein lies the main problem!!!!

One of these days the City will be forced to disclose such things by the Province since the City continues to show it is not willing to be transparent on its own.

I thought that would change with the current council, but obviously not.

“There is a reason only one local company bid”

Local companies have had bad experiences with the City. The IPG site was done by a local company. It was quite slick, although much simpler. That company moved to Calgary.

I’m not surprised at the price tag. Even the lowest quality and simplest websites are shockingly expensive if you outsource it. Something like this needs to be outsourced. The website also gives an impression of the city to prospective business or new residents. We can’t have the cheapest option and look 20 years behind.

Bill it really not excessive. Flashing bling is not what costs a lot, it is a sound well functioning web site that is easily navigatable that costs. We are not talking about a simple web site. Even 250 is far far less complex than the wide diversity of tools and data the city’s should have.

Sounds like the snow was deep and the hill was steep both ways kind of story. ;-)

“The website also gives an impression of the city to prospective business”

That is the cheapest part of the task. It is common in architectural firms, for instance, to put the new graduates to work on the “aesthetics” of a building. It is the experienced people who work on the planning of the layout to meet the client’s space needs and to work with the technical (engineering) integration of a building.

In the end it is that which will cause clients to recommend the firm to others.

In my view, it is the same with virtually all such design projects.

I am not concerned with the price. I am concerned that we found out so late about something so visible. I am concerned that the information will be just as stale and unclear and in the end just as inaccessible.

Moving data over, such as minutes of meetings, video of council meetings, etc. is easy. The historic data does not change.

The process of leading a “client”, which means both residents as well as out of town visitors, businesses, researchers, etc., through the path to find what they are looking for, that is the key to site functionality.

Right now, the site is not easy to navigate. It is better than the one previous to the current version was.

It should be modularized so that if a department changes that that module can be adjusted accordingly. Also, and most important, nothing about the site should be proprietary so that the IT department can make changes without being faced with changing algorithms which may affect a number unknown components down or upstream.

“the City uses an antiquated system for all their internal proceedings which must connect with their site, thus, their site must use these antiquated technologies”

Quite possible, but for all we know that is part of the change included in the scope of the project.

Here we go again, we really do not know, do we. And we have Mr. Rob, the infamous fellow from UNBC in charge. Not a good start. But maybe he has no say in the matter. Or maybe it is his doing. We do not have a clue about that either.

The City is mysterious and will continue to be that way from the looks of it.

” the hill was steep both ways kind of story”

Topography works that way.

The steepness of the hill does not change nor does the depth of snow going both ways following the same route.

There is only one difference, one is uphill, the other is downhill.

Either way a car can spin out or a person walking can fall. ;-)

haha true true. At my age going up and down steep hills is just as painful.

If any of you did any coding to make even one page website, you will understand how long and complex it takes.

‘If any of you did any coding to make even one page website, you will understand how long and complex it takes.’ – another blowhard who has no idea what they are talking about. There is zero coding to a one page website today, none. Buy a domain with godaddy and you get a prepackaged wordpress site, for free. That code is entirely open source, you can buy any plugin or generic chunk of code for pennies on the dollar.

Nobody codes from scratch, nobody uses anymore. There are numerous repositories for any major coding language out there that will give you it all for free. You are paying a coder to modify that code to suit your needs, which is very cheap. I wish you people would stop talking as if you knew anything about programming, or design, because you do not.

Are you really suggesting the city could do this in house with go-daddy.

It is a totaly different monster. I think you would be surprised about what people know and dont know.

The “website” is just the public/client interface in this case. It will hand off data both ways to the cities internal systems. You are really dumbing it down to much, as was Bill in his story.

I was going to leave this discussion alone but LeroyJenkins brought me over the edge…

Who do you get to do the back-end coding cheaply in PHP, AJAX, Python, Ruby, Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java (not related) and/or JQuery? Some numb-nuts working for peanuts via Fiverr? This kind of work is expensive if you want quality, efficiency, and most of all, security. Yes you can buy “plug-ins” or even get free ones, but they’re still going to need many serious modifications, and hopefully they don’t blow up with numerous error codes for the end user.

As for UI and UX design, that is a different talent all-together that costs money. But everybody thinks their have a creative “flair”, a kid who has an “interest”, or they buy templates that are complete crap, and purchased over and over again by other companies.

I have a poster on my work wall that I live by that reads “There will always be someone who says they can do it cheaper…. but at what cost?”

Side-Bar to Bill Phillips…. maybe you shouldn’t be talking about “web tech” when you can’t even get your article paragraphs to separate on 250.

gopg2015 “Local companies have had bad experiences with the City. The IPG site was done by a local company. It was quite slick, although much simpler. That company moved to Calgary.”

Thank you for the compliment about the Initiatives Prince George site. Just one tiny correction, we (Splash Media Group) built that site, and we are still very much in town!

“I wish you people would stop talking as if you knew anything about programming, or design, because you do not.”

Please make that “some of you people”.

For instance, I learned how to type in high school because I had a spare and decided to join a friend of mine in a grade 11 typing class because we discovered that Miss Ottawa Rough Rider was in the class. 

Little did I realize how useful typing was to become in later years.

When I took Architecture at UofT, the magazines of the day (1965) were starting to show the rudimentaries of the use of computers to generate simple three dimensional frame models of buildings. However, the faculty had no access to computers so I took an evening class at Ryerson Polytech in Fortran. That taught me the discipline of programming and more importantly, the discipline of troubleshooting both of which are still useful to this day even outside the field of computer programming.

I have created web sites from scratch using html and use WordPress these days. For lay people to use any of such open source content language systems/platforms without having some understanding of the logic of building a menu structure geared to the most common user of a site is nearly insurmountable without a lot of discipline for detail and understanding of complex logic matrices.

Again, building websites is like any professional discipline. Modern technology and the development of building blocks by hundreds of thousands of people the world over from the time of the TRS-80 (Trash 80) beginning in 1977 coupled with open source programming systems like AutoCad in the Architecture/Engineering field have made it easy to computerize the work of most professions.

However, what many people fail to understand is that one cannot just push a few buttons and make the thing work. One has to have a solid understanding of the professional discipline involved, then add the computer as the workhorse which will take one to heights that were not achievable 40 years ago and even 20 years ago.

That is why I am posting the notion that accessing the programming packets of a large, possibly complex, web site is no longer so difficult. What is difficult is the complexity of the menu structure to accommodate various types of users, a smart search engine which is responsive to the several types of users so that it makes reasonably correct choices of paths through the maze and finally, that when one gets to the various items one is searching for the info is legible and understandable for the level of the individual who is seeking the information.

That is where the communication between the consultant and the City employees will come start to play an important part. Whether the site will be useful to the various clients who will use it will depend just as much on the consultant as on City staff. This is also where a good consultant will be able to provide the best value for money if the consultant is able to transfer all the knowledge obtained from past projects to the City. No one at the City will have that kind of background. To access that experience it is important for the contract with the City to specify who will actually be the project leader and immediate assistants and how much experience they each bring to the project.

Finally, the City contract administrator must ensure that the expertise is delivered as proposed and a quality control mechanism be set up which involves the general public who will test drive the beta system. They, in fact, are the clients …. not the City.

For example, when designing a Hospital, it is the users such as doctors and nurses and cleaning staff who are the users of the hospital, not the hospital administration. The users have to be able to work with the layout and the equipment. The same with a web site.

‘Are you really suggesting the city could do this in house with go-daddy.’

No, but thanks for demonstrating you can’t read very well.

‘Who do you get to do the back-end coding cheaply in PHP, AJAX, Python, Ruby, Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java (not related) and/or JQuery? Some numb-nuts working for peanuts via Fiverr? This kind of work is expensive if you want quality, efficiency, and most of all, security. Yes you can buy “plug-ins” or even get free ones, but they’re still going to need many serious modifications, and hopefully they don’t blow up with numerous error codes for the end user.’

I can tell you with certainty, they are recycling the same code used for many of the sites in this industry. Oh, and please, PHP..AJAX..lol Python? Programmers are a dime a dozen via odesk. It is not expensive, not one bit.

I have no idea where you find your code, but most plugins are foolproof, and work fine for the basic user. I’m not suggesting an off the shelf plugin will work for the city website, I’m arguing the complexity of ‘programming’ in general…

I’m saying that the city is being targeted and held ransom, because they have performed zero research in the cost of building a usable website. It isn’t rocket science, and it certainly isn’t worth anything over the 100k mark.

Am I the only one who found a serious disconnect between the headline and the article itself? I expected to read about seven things that would astonish me…instead I only read one–the price–and a lengthy argument about why that seemed too high to the writer.

So what, pray tell, are the six other things that will shock and annoy me besides the price???

I just did a cut and paste of the points I found in the article. Remember, it is about things we just won’t believe….. However, some of us will believe many of them as well as other things. Others will find only one thing. :-)

1. $124,300 to revamp the city’s website does seem excessive.
2. 18 months to do the work.
3. I’m all for public input, but do we really need to hold a series of public meetings to tell eSolutions, the company doing the work, what everyone else already knows? That is that the city’s website isn’t all that user-friendly.
4. eSolutions might be able to tell us a thing or two about what should be on the website.
5. the data on the current site will have to be transferred to the new one. For the city’s website, the number of individual files to transfer would be easily be in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, or more. It’s a big task, there’s no doubt about that.
6. the city is looking at offering more on its website than it does now
7. and make it “responsive,” meaning it will work well on smartphones and tablets.
8. My fear is that, for $124,300, we’re going get lots of frills and splashy ‘cool’ things that we see on websites all over the place. We don’t need that.

BTW, a designer of anything is not a good designer if they do not listen or read well to get all the points ;-)

One thing that we all could do is make a list of what we want on the city’s web site, that is, what information, accessible in what ways, and what services. Do you want easily searchable versions of the bylaws and relevant provincial legislation? Do you want the the city budget? Do you want to be able to apply for a business license on-line?