selfstasis

I’m appauled at how site designs get blown back to the Ice Age for the sake of community advancement. Specifically, I’m talking about the Franklin community site - www.franklinpennsylvania.us.

You want to know how much that site cost? At the beginning of the project, the site cost $60,000 of a $100,000 projected budget plan by CIN. Most of the money came from PA tax payers through grants and private contributions within the Franklin community. Who is the CIN? CIN stands for Community Informatics Network, a company from New Castle, Pa. C.I.N. in itself describes the emerging principles and practices of communication of information to the community. In a nutshell, a community PORTAL. Whoooopie Dooo DA. From last I heard, CIN was able to receive all of all $100,000 from the state and the community for the development of two main websites - one for the community and the other for city government. Community Informatics is a well studied and researched topic. It seems sound. However for a community portal to thrive constant feedback from it’s end users must exist. In Franklin’s site only one or two people post the majority of the events, and most of those events are not accessed through the input of the community. So what happens? Information becomes stale and months old. “Community” becomes pointless.

So what’s my beef? Part of it is above. Personally I think it’s a sham. This company came from outside of the community with “expertise” in this space. Which is fine, but the design SUCKS. Let’s dissect this site apart. Content from post, blogs, forums to 99% of the site is managed by an open source solution, the Drupal CMS. Drupal is a fairly good cms for community portals however limited in module selections. Implementation of a design is straight-forward however limited in module position to left or right. But even with these limitations a more viable design template can be implemented than that piece of garbarge they currently have online.

Sorry WebSchuur, I’m not impressed. I think you can do way better. Design is everywhere, implemented right, it looks good - it feels good. Implemented half assed - design kills.

As of last Saturday night, I am officially engaged to be married. Quite exciting . The boys at work were actually quite supportive but then later joked around with the idea of it. Nothing cynical but jokingly. Then another good set of news on Tuesday night - my niece is having a baby, I will be a great uncle (I think). I bet my big brother is excited. Thanks everyone for the all support. Everybody has been excited so far. So much planning to do and so many good ideas we’ve seen from other weddings. But we have our own ideas as well. I can’t wait…..