DC web design news

Sick and tired of listening to the debate about Government spending?  Then vote for WordPress to help save the Federal Government millions of taxpayer dollars.  Click here to vote for WordPress for Government.

Quick story…

Back in 2008, I was hired by a federal agency to come in and change the system, to take control of their website, to help manage the content, manage the contractors, accelerate development, and make things happen.  When I got there, I saw a team of 5 contractors (one project manager, one designer, two developers, one content manager) who were “managing their content.”  I put “managing their content” in quotes because they weren’t really managing content.  Instead, they were copying and pasting content from a Word document into a horribly user-hostile, proprietary content management system.

By the time you pay for these contractors’ salaries, benefits, office space, and then their manager and their manager’s manager, and their manager’s manager’s manager and the executives up the chain, each contractor costs the Federal Government, i.e., the American tax payer, about $250,000 per year.  Now, multiply that by 5.  What have you got?  A contract worth $1.25 million dollars per year x 5 years ($6.25 million) to pay people to copy and paste content from Microsoft Word into HTML and then upload to a server hosted by the Federal Government that crashed at least once every 3 months.

By the way, add to the cost of “managing content” additional money to “manage the server”.  They have a team of people (another $750,000/year) paid to manage a couple servers when they could have easily outsourced this to Rackspace for $750/month.

Hmmm, should I pay $750,000/year for a couple IT guys and their IT manager to watch a couple servers or pay $9,000/year for one of the best, most reliable, and most efficient web server companies in the world to maintain it in their secure, redundant facilities cached to Akamai?  Difficult conundrum, I know.

I kept hammering them to migrate to open source, host on the cloud, and allow the Federal Government public affairs officers to do their job: to manage their own content using easy-to-use open source content management systems like WordPress.

By the way, there are about 20,000 .GOV websites in existence.  How much money do you think we could save if every government agency migrated to easy-to-use web content management systems like WordPress hosted securely by the likes of Rackspace?  How much money do you think we could save if government workers were empowered to manage their own content instead of sending a Word document to a $250,000/year contractor to copy and paste into a horribly hostile proprietary CMS?

By the way, after a year on the war path they got tired of my mantra and fired me one day before my one year probation period ended, thereby ending my federal government career.  That’s the reward I got for trying to improve government and save tax payer dollars.  That’s okay, I’m making twice the money and having twice the fun running a business.

So, if you are sick and tired of listening to Democrats and Republicans bitch, complain and argue  about government spending and government deficits then how about going to Idea scale, registering, logging in, and clicking the “I agree” to my suggestion to use WordPress, open source, and cloud hosting for Government websites.