There continues to be a lot of interest about the million dollar State web site I’ve been digging in to over the past few days.
I’ve got as much information as I can from the public sites and am now making an open records for the RFP response from PCC Tech to find out just how it is we’re paying so much for so little.
I’ll continue to post updates here and won’t just let this be swept under the rug.
On a more personal note, Happy New Year to you and yours!
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
I'm the President of The Park People of Milwaukee County, President-elect of the Washington Heights Neighborhood Association, an elected official of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, a union leader, community organizer and transit advocate who is working to make Milwaukee great again. I've been writing this weblog for nearly ten years ... read more...
Danny boy, I’ll give you this for free: I’ve prowled around under the hood a little bit, and frankly, I defy any professional in the industry to look at the web code here and keep a straight face. I confess, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, looking at what was behind this. Imagine, for example, claiming a doctype of XHTML and using a center tag! (For the uninitiated, this is akin to finding a kerosene lamp inside something advertised as an LED flashlight.)
For a million, I’d expect gold standard tools and hand-crafted excellence, yet it’s just built with standard, off-the-shelf .NET tools (maybe some deeper .NET-heads could refine that projection; I’m not sure if things like WebResource.axd ever made it into 3.x, for example) like winform and RADcontrols. (Why someone wants a website to look and feel like windows instead of something easier, especially when representing a state that sued MS in the past, is to say the least a debatable question.)
Instead of a modern web application, we get a table-based design filled with spacer.gifs! (Again, for the uninitiated, this is like building a house using stone tools and square nails.) For that kind of money, they could have at least hired someone to put a 21st-century face on the site, if they were incapable of doing it themselves! (For those tempted to blame .NET for the bad code: I’ve worked in a .NET shop before; bad code comes from bad coders, not the tools. I mean, I don’t have a high opinion of .NET, it forces you to use some, well, interesting techniques, but stuff this bad isn’t .NET’s fault.)
This thing is a kick in the groin to Wisconsin web firms. I know a dozen places just here in town that could turn out a better piece of work than this for less money.