Was there an open bid process on this ? The upfront cost and ongoing monthly maintenance costs (equal to a teacher's salary) seem extremely high for this product. If you count up the all the pages, you come up with less 60, and there wasn't any work done on each individual school site. The work description was website only implying there wasn't any backoffice work done either, for example to scheduling or grading products.

The old site was pretty bad, but it seems like a school district should be able to maintain a website. I like the idea of making it a project for a computer class at the high school. Seems like money that could be better spent elsewhere. I created and maintain a couple of websites and it isn't THAT hard.

jballard, you make some very good points, but I still think the school district should have the capacity to maintain their website. That being said, the new site looks great.

Good points jballard. As parents in the community, we tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to things related to our kids and our wallets. In the long run, this will be a tremendous improvement for our community.

Thanks also for pointing out what it said in the very article that we are posting to that "The pages for individual schools remain largely unchanged, but plans are to update them in the months ahead." (Point to Franklin's issue.)

There is a couple of issues I wanted to address... the first is the warning that is showing up for the Franklin site. The Franklin site is still the original site that was not built by Foremost Media. This site has been tagged by Google as suspicious because of the virus problem that the district servers had over the past few months. The site has been cleaned up and is waiting on a review by Google again to verify that the site is clean and remove the warning. The Franklin site as well as all the other specific school sites are scheduled for a redesign in the next few months as well.

The second issue I wanted to address is the cost. What you may not realize is that in addition to the main district website there are 21 school websites being redeveloped. Many of these sites were being maintained by paid school district staff in the past. From what I understand the district also had a dedicated staff member from the IT department to maintain the main district website. In addition to the payroll cost savings associated by outsourcing website maintenance the district no longer has the cost and security risks that came with the internal hosting of the website.

Just my 2 Cents.

I am so glad the new website is up! The old site was unfriendly at best, and an embarrassment for the school district. This is money well spent. Kudos to the public information specialist and everyone who made this happen.

Gandalf, I was thinking the same thing. My child is 12 and has made many a website. Some pretty cool ones too!

It's a shame that the school district has to rely on a 3rd-party for their web site, especially at such a significant expense. The taxpayers and school community would be better served by having this site managed and hosted in-house by qualified school district staff working with the teachers of computer classes. It would be nice to have the site maintenance and enhancement activities be part of the instructional curriculum of advanced computer classes.

Your tax dollars at work once again!:(

Trish is correct. This is the Google warning page for Franklin:
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/s...
.
I hope this is already cleaned up. If you use Firefox you will be prevented from accessing the site without explicitly clicking through the warnings. With Internet Explorer you're surfing at your own risk.

I just went there and tried to go to my childs middle school page. A big warning came up saying the site contained malware and may be harmful to my computer. Hmmmm

Why is tax money being used for this? Couldn't this money be better spent somewhere else in the school system?

WOW....$42,000 for maintaining a web site. What the heck is going on here? That's $20.19 per hour, for this kind of money you would think the map would open. The old site may have been a bit quirky but geez loweez $42,000 for some whiny parents that just need to keep complainng. trust me, these same whiners will be at it again in no time.