Hi Tim,

I saw that article and immediately thought of you. Not for the schools connection, that's too obvious. But because it has to do with the rather simple task of hosting a web site. And for $10K? WOW!! It better be the best damn web site taxpayers have ever bought!

How come they didn't come to your company to host the web site? While the $10K price tag would have been great for business, I'm sure you would have done it for considerably less given the benefits to the community just for making it available. And I'm sure you would have done it on time! This just goes to show that there's too much beauracrazy (not a misspelling) in our schools.

I agree, WOW, 10K for a website, that seems awfully steep to me! My research has shown that $3000 is average for a web-designer with hosting of $500, does that sound reasonble to you since you are in the biz. Will that include administration and updating the website on a regular basis?

Alan,

Thanks for your comments - I certainly wasn't trying to imply anything in the way of being upset we didn't get the business. Though I wonder how all those web development companies on the shopsimivalleyfirst.com web site feel about a company from Cerritos being hired to do this job for SVUSD.

I have plenty of competition in town that probably could have done the job for considerably less. The time is take to deliver a project though is largely dependant on the cooperation of the customer.

Donna, it's hard to know what's included in the $10,000 estimate, but I agree with you it is indeed high. I would hope that the site was built to be self-updateable, which would mean a staff person could upload documents, text, pictures etc... I would assume that would explain the lack of documents or content at this time.

Tim

I was going through some old articles and ran across the one that Angie Valencia-Martinez wrote last September. I went to the link and found that most of the sections were blank. I don’t remember seeing any current information. So I sent an email to Angie and asked if she could do a follow-up story. I’m happy to find that she did.

Lowell Schwartz says he hopes the site will be ready this week – another promise.

Let me quote from the article:
Because of revisions to the schedule and budget, officials decided to hold off on the Internet project until they knew how to address the projected $60 million shortfall.

Let’s face it, construction schedules and budgets are not static. They will always be changing. Does this mean that if the district suddenly discovers that there is no shortfall that they won’t be able to put anything on the website until they get it all sorted out?

I have been a financial analyst tracking costs on large development programs. In the olden days, 100 years ago or so, we put together a monthly report on each project. By comparing the “budgeted cost of work scheduled” to the “budgeted cost of work performed” to the “actual cost of work performed”, we were able to generate a cost variance and a schedule variance. We used a mainframe to crunch the numbers. These days, a desktop PC can do the same task and we issue weekly reports. I see no reason that there cannot be a report issued for each project at each school.

Jerre

I was Chairman of the bond oversight committee and, in that role, offerred to host it for FREE. Of course, that would have taken away any excuses for the District. As I'm sure you all know, the District has little interest in shedding the light of day on the messy details of the Bond program. They don't want all of you knowing what they know!

We could have had a functional and useful web site up over a year ago at no cost to the District.

Chris,

I am confident that the next excuse will be: "Well the district is behind technologically..yadayada"...

As many people know, most high schoolers can build web sites now (see my post regarding myspace.com). The "technology" comes in when it comes to how users want to manage and archive the content on their web site. Even then, using industry standard tools could and should have brought this in for much lower.

You have to wonder why the students at Santa Su High, our technology magnet high school, weren't consulted on this project. I would suspect many would have jumped at the chance to build the web site and archiving application outright.

I think the wanton disregard for tax dollars should give voters and taxpayers pause as they consider how the rest of these projects are being handled.

But then again, we've heard that somewhere, haven't we?

Tim Keaney