Orangescale Studio

WordPress, the publishing platform we’re using — not only for this site, but also for mine and my girl’s — does it again. An interesting story about how WordPress is being used to build City of Albert Lea website. That’s right, it is using WordPress 2.7.

It is said that the city saves up to $19,000 by using WordPress. Here are the short story.

Some cities pay a consultant $10,000, $20,000, even $50,000 for a Web-based content-management site that looks professional and is consistent through and through. Fairbault is one instance.

Albert Lea, however, paid $720 to local resident Jeshua Erickson last December, she said. Kauffmann was in charge of the site’s revision, and last October she put together a committee of city officials to advise her.

She said the committee decided to shoot for a site using a content management system — or CMS — but it was outside of her Internet skills. The city began seeking estimates from Web design companies. When the estimates returned, they realized the city couldn’t afford it.

“We just didn’t feel we could justify spending $20,000-plus on a Web site,” Kauffmann said. “I happened to run into Jeshua Erickson on the Pelican Breeze one day, and we talked about Web sites and how he was developing them using WordPress.”

WordPress offers open-source, simple-to-use templates for Web sites for zero cost.

About the theme development, here is the story:

“We found an open-source WordPress template that was for cities, and we just modified the living daylights out of it,” Erickson said. “It started as an open template, but we did a lot of changes to suit the needs they (city officials) wanted.” Read the full story.

What I learn is that building a website is not only about finding the best/complex CMS. But, it’s more on the need. If an open source software — like WordPress — can do it, why not using it? Audience does not have to know about what kind of publishing platform a site is using. The main idea is that the site owner can deliver the information easily and CMS does the task.