I have heard some pretty funny explanations from city staff over the years as to why certain consent items need passed, but this one takes the cake (Item #6, sub item #26) (Allie is explaining why a web development company needs additional funding to build the city’s website);

One way to think about the difference between the initial agreement and amendment is if the initial agreement is building the house, the amendment is ensuring we have the right, high?quality and functional appliances, fixtures and furniture for each room.

I always heat up the blog in the microwave before posting 🙂

The city has already allocated $425K to rebuild the city’s website, this is additional funding. The price tag should be concerning. I have worked with web developers over the years and initially when the WWW was introduced there was a lot of manual coding that was very time consuming and expensive. That is really no longer the case. Charging per page to build this site is like buying a couch and getting charged extra for the cushions (see what I did there 🙂

I would understand if you were a small business asking a developer to build a website from scratch that included videos, an online store, etc. Many small businesses use outside IT services because it is just more affordable. But the city of Sioux Falls has 28 employees in the technology department with combined salaries of around $2.4 million. There is absolutely no reason why the city can’t rebuild the city website without outside consultation. It may have to do with the fact that after 3 directors have left they currently have no one running the department.