My tax dollars at work

http://www.charlottebusinessresources.com/

Quote :

"The City Council approved starting the website last summer, and it went live in mid-May. The site cost $110,000, and the city has set aside another $40,000 to market it. Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/07/04/2427488/starting-a-business-try-citys.html#ixzz1RBJZleOh"

7/4/2011 7:16:20 PM

While it's not bad dunno if it's 110K worth of work either.

7/4/2011 7:17:20 PM

yeah its not bad but its not 6-figure-awesome by any means

7/4/2011 7:17:49 PM

$110K?

It better have a feature where it finds the nearest hole to put my dick in for god damn $110K

Hell they fucked up the color wheel on the home page drop downs

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 7:34 PM. Reason : I chose the wrong profession ]

7/4/2011 7:34:16 PM

But does it have site 3?

7/4/2011 7:36:38 PM

so that's the cost for like a team of five contractors to build it in about 2-3 months.

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 7:42 PM. Reason : cheap]

7/4/2011 7:38:03 PM

Is it really inline? Am I just grossly underestimating what a site like that would cost? You'd certainly have a better perspective on it than I would but it seemed pretty expensive to me.

You're saying that site took like 2000+ hours to build?

7/4/2011 7:43:12 PM

The font of the non-bolded words in the main navbar is fucking with me. Why are some of the letters taller than others?

7/4/2011 7:53:55 PM

well i mean they definitely could have gotten it cheaper, but you that's the premium you pay to not take a risk on some lone dude who will do it for 20k or outsourcing it to india.

i mean, the actual site structure and features aren't terribly complex and they probably were able to use some content management framework or something, but the design work is all original i'm sure, and you know they had to go back and forth AT LEAST a half dozen times with the city with various mockups and iterations. probably the most expensive part was curating all the content on there. it's not like some web developer is gonna know what the city wants on the Starting a Business / Licensing & Permitting page. You've got a project manager that's gonna have to find the right people in the city to take the time to write up an accurate and hypothetically informative document on what information needs to be displayed

7/4/2011 7:54:03 PM

i'm sure the city definitely saw some drafts and requested major overhauls, but it just seems like a lot of the info on the site is links to other existing sites, and a lot of their other information is already available at sosnc.com or charmeck.org. Most of the information is already available in electronic format, it seems like they're just making another site of full of links.

7/4/2011 8:03:06 PM

I'd say it is very light on content. I don't think the design is worth that much, either.

This is equal to one very-well paid person working for a year comes up with this? That's not very productive

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 8:09 PM. Reason : .]

7/4/2011 8:06:31 PM

Not expensive.


Nor is the team responsible for building the site responsible for the end result content.





It's very easy to criticize work whne you don't work in the field, but that is what a site of this size costs (on average) in NC. It's what the market will bear.

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 8:31 PM. Reason : no one complains when their auto mechanic charges $75 an hour]

7/4/2011 8:30:05 PM

would the market bear that price for a private company if they wanted to create something similar? i guess $110k is more reasonable than I initially thought but I'm still trying to grasp how it wasn't somewhat of a ripoff. Of course while I'm not in the web design industry, I am familiar with various Charlotte/Mecklenburg/NC websites for businesses, permits, licenses, etc, so I do know that a lot of these resources are already fairly reasonable accessible

the whole bing.com search engine probably costed millions to develop but to me I could already do the same thing with google

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 8:50 PM. Reason : maybe i'm just criticizing them since their site is basically 1/4 of my browsers bookmarks lol]

7/4/2011 8:44:28 PM

Quote :

"no one complains when their auto mechanic charges $75 an hour"

Im not allowed to use tax dollars to fix my car...

7/4/2011 9:13:13 PM

i'm sure there are plenty of people who will gladly take a 50% pay cut for the privilege of providing their labor in service of their fellow citizen

7/4/2011 9:23:40 PM

heck, qntmfred could of done it for 1 grand......

7/4/2011 9:44:02 PM

well sure, but that's because i have a bad habit of doing things for free

7/4/2011 9:45:44 PM

There are definitely a lot of asshole companies out there who have no qualms about ripping off the tax payers. It's shocking to hear but a large portion of business owners are really shady, money grubbing jerks who hate the gov. enough to rip us all off.

You can only go with the cheaper guy and get burned by poor quality work before people demand you play into private companies gouging the government.

7/4/2011 9:49:38 PM

Quote :

"There are definitely a lot of asshole companies out there who have no qualms about ripping off the tax payers. "

Who's CEO probably plays golf monthly with whichever city official was responsible for assigning the contract...

7/4/2011 9:51:49 PM

I don't blame the web designers for trying to make a buck in this shit economy...I'd put more blame on the county government for not exploring some more options with different vendors...don't want this thread to turn soapbox but if anything the company had some nice recommendations for business from some particular political powers that be to get a generous rate

although ITT people in the web design industry seem to confirm that its not that outrageous of a price

[Edited on July 4, 2011 at 9:54 PM. Reason : ^yeah kinda]

7/4/2011 9:54:20 PM

"Oh this project is for a government contract? Well then..."

I've been warned about not saying I was working on government contracts when collecting service quotes. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened here.

7/4/2011 9:55:40 PM

We sell our iPhone/Android apps for $200-$300k, a large portion of that is license though.

7/5/2011 7:00:46 AM

i know shit about web design, but can someone please enlighten me as to how something like this could possibly cost this much?

political associations aside, speaking in purely work/effort/knowledge required, what is involved that can drive a price up like this?

is it name recognition of the design firm?

7/5/2011 8:05:44 AM

they probably had to make about 30 different versions of that site over the course of the development and the back-and-forth with whoever commissioned it, plus i'd imagine some of it pays for future support

still pretty pricey for what it is, especially considering it's just a damn wordpress install

[Edited on July 5, 2011 at 8:14 AM. Reason : http://www.crown-com.com/work/clients.php]

7/5/2011 8:12:54 AM

Didn't read the thread, but that price doesn't seem out of line at all. Maybe not the best use of money for a city government right now, but the price is right, bitch.

7/5/2011 10:00:19 AM

When you figure in the costs of leasing the domain, server-space, maintenance/webmastering, newsletters, photography, legal documentation, etc. it's not really that outrageous.

It could be done for less, but its probably not the biggest rip-off in the city budget.

It's actually a pretty convenient source of info for folks who use the internet, but aren't "net-savvy".

7/5/2011 10:46:18 AM