Community news sites would not exist without the tech tools for easily building websites and creating digital content. However, again and again, New Voices projects that aspired to build custom websites were tripped up by design and development delays.
“We fell far enough behind schedule that we had to hire a young assistant to do some of the work … so design became our single largest expense.”
-Ben Burns
Grosse Point Today
Bay Voices’s Ethnic News Service, Mi-Whi News, New Era News, the North Lawndale Community Weblog, Policy Options and others experienced lengthy delays as outside web developers placed them low on their list of client priorities or university IT people had insufficient time to help them. In some cases universities didn’t want to give site contributors full access to post content on the sites they built.
Great Lakes Echo moved from a wiki to WordPress. “It’s not as pretty as we’d like,” said Dave Poulson. “But it works and we’re publishing content when we might still be waiting if we went with Drupal.”
Bill Finnegan, founder of Vermont Climate Witness, wishes he would have gone open-source instead of spending money on a customized site. He ended up locked into the vendor for updates, which “challenged us to achieve our mission.”
Ben Burns commissioned a custom Drupal site for Grosse Pointe Today. “We fell far enough behind schedule that we had to hire a young assistant to do some of the work … so design became our single largest expense.”
“I would recommend that other startups seriously consider using WordPress” to start, he said — advice that was echoed by others.