New Haven Independent

Berkowitz to Click & Fix Board of Ed’s Site

by Allan Appel | December 9, 2008 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

nhipaws%20003.JPG The Board of Education has plans to retain local web designer Ben Berkowitz to rebuild and redesign its website.

At Monday night’s meeting of the BOE’s Administration and Finance Committee, members approved an agreement for Berkowitz’s company CT-WEB.NET to rebuild NHPS.NET, making the Board’s site far more user friendly, and easy to navigate. The contract is not to exceed $38,000. The full board met immediately after the committee meeting and approved the contract.

According to Will Clark, the BOE’s chief operating officer, the current website does not lend itself to easy browsing or navigation. “If I want to look at the Food Dude’s menus and then go check out something about school construction, I may have to click half a dozen times and maybe get back to the home page first and then to my next destination. Ben’s going to fix all that.”

Berkowitz said that he’s employing Drupal, open source software that will make the content management easy and friendly. Currently some of the schools have active pages on the BOE’s site, while other schools have poorly maintained pages. Some have no pages at all. “With Ben’s redesign,” Clark said, “the aim is to maximize the friendliness, to get the principals to use the pages as much as possible.”

Michael Nast, another BOE member, cautioned, “You can bring the horse, that is, the principal, to water, but you can’t make him or her drink.”

Clark said the redesign would establish a baseline so that all the schools would have a site for their particular school and then link board’s site. “Especially as we bring SchoolNet online,” he said, referring to the vast data base of information on student performance by school, class, and individual that will, theoretically, be used by thousands of parents and teachers, “the site needs to be as friendly as possible, and with a lot more band.”

Berkowitz, whose other projects include the citizen watchdog site SeeClickFix, a feature available on the The New Haven Independent’s home page, is also active in the Upper State Street Association and other community entrepreneurial and safety initiatives.

Berkowitz’s contract begins immediately. Clark said results should be apparent by the summer, or even before.

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Comments

Posted by: Uncle Nunzio | December 9, 2008 4:52 PM

Yet another no-bid contract for the city of New Haven.

And Drupal is terribly programmed and riddled with security problems. Who plans to maintain the system after the contract is over? If Drupal isn't well-maintained and update it becomes an easy target to get hacked.

Posted by: Ben | December 9, 2008 6:20 PM

Security is always a concern with every site Uncle Nunzio but I tend to agree with this opinion from - http://groups.drupal.org/node/8980:
"Open source projects are generally considered much more secure than their private, closed counter parts, precisely because the code is public. While it does allow hackers to review code for weakness, it also allows everyone else to do the same, and when an issue is found, it allows the almost immediate release of a fix by someone in the community. Look at both the real and perceived security of the standard Linux distro vs. Microsoft. There's a reason (besides performance!) why almost all mission critical web servers run Linux.

All software has weaknesses. As they say, security is not a feature, but a process. It's not perfect, but Drupal has an excellent security rep. When issues with the core or contributed modules are found, a fix is usually posted the same day. There is a mailing list to keep you apprised of these updates."

Posted by: jay | December 10, 2008 10:42 AM

what is the return on the investment of 38k ? We shouldn't spend money that doesn't either save money, or save resources.

Posted by: cedarhillresident | December 10, 2008 7:31 PM

I agree that this should of been bidded out.
But with that said Ben has made many differences in the city and may have saved more than that amount in improvements and quality of life issues, that he has helped get started. So I do have to say congrats ben!

Posted by: anon | December 11, 2008 6:02 PM

I would say that 38k to get parents more involved in their school district would be a good investment.

Better than subsidizing the Superintendent's mega-SUV. How about cutting that from the budget?

Berkowitz to Click & Fix Board of Ed’s Site

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