Peter Duke | What Medium does the Message Want?

Schools are pressed for cash now days, and if you hire an expensive consulting firm to come in and tell you how to solve your problem, often they will recommend another expensive consulting firm. Technology is cheap, nowadays, knowledge is expensive, that is unless you know where to look. Knowledge arbitrage is a bit of a shell game.

My daughters public charter school needed a website and I knew how to deliver a state-of-the-art site for next-to-nothing, at least in cash, by donating my understanding.

Marquez Charter Elementary School Website

We crafted a Web 2.0 site by combining the open source, off-the-shelf WordPress platform with a variety of other web services. We knew that by using these powerful programs, we could deliver a platform that had functionality beyond the imagination of most of the school’s sponsoring committee. So we got to work on setting up the site, eager to provide an excellent site for the 600-odd students.

What we did

The school was being considered for a “California State Distinguished School” Award, so the schedule for the creation of the site was extremely aggressive. We used the program Basecamp for project coordination, divided the responsibilities for technology, design, and content, and completed the site in 10 working days. Hosted on a grid server at Media Temple, the $20/month account provided one-click installation, storage and email capacity for the entire enterprise. This was extremely important for both cost reasons and ease-of-use reasons. When completed, the site combined the resources of various programs: 30boxes for calendaring, Feedburner for email distribution, Paypal, Cafe Press, Printfection and Amazon Associates for fund raising activities, and Google for analytics. This package delivers a huge amount of value for the public school and its 600 students.

Our results

By using third-party web applications, the school is able to deliver a tremendous amount of value to the students, parents, teachers and administrators of the school. By streamlining the communication between parents and the school, the site allows the quick transfer of information, eliminating hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper distributed by the back-pack network of students — insuring that parents receive information from the school and saving paper. By providing an up-to-the-minute information resource, parents are now enabled to stay current with the school on a variety of devices, from computers to mobile phones. By establishing a single information source for the entire school, clarity reigns supreme! And with such a low price tag, the school is happy with the outcome on all levels. It was a good challenge for us, and we are excited to continue to work with the school.