WebJunction

Is it possible to post the RFP? Or to describe in a list of bullet points your most important or required features. It is hard to say whether the $20,000 is reasonable based upon the requirements of the system.

There might be ways to lower that cost and reach your objectives, although as you point out it might be a gradual process over a couple years.

Do you have limitations as far as the technologies that you have to use? (Microsoft vs. open source platforms, for example)

Do you want to / have the capacity / capability to host in the library or funding to pay for an external hosting solution?

Are there ideal web sites (library or otherwise) that epitomize where you would like to end up when the project is finished?

Here's an alternate suggestion from Alan Kirk gray that I just stumbled upon over at the Walking Paper blog:

http://www.walkingpaper.org/510

"Third, they should band together in peer groups of ten libraries each, distributed nationally so they are at a distance from one another, and contract jointly for a full-blown web site redesign that incorporates a state-of-the-art Content Management infrastructure, integrated Customer Management applications, fully-developed social software attributes and a link to their ILS, with the agreement each library may skin the resulting deliverable in its own image and fill it with its own content, with the result that each library receives the benefit of significant professional work product at one-tenth the going rate."

Maybe you could join with other libraries to share the cost of building out the infrastructure and then devote the resources to filling in the content gradually (or maybe getting community volunteers to tackle part of that depending on the nature of the content).

Thanks, folks for your replies...Honored to be Question of the Week, too!

As an update, and in response to a couple of questions posted earlier: our RFP was posted at http://www.wcls.org/websiterfp.htm, and we received only two replies...none locally. We did contact lots of local vendors and let them know about our needs, and after we didn't receive responses from them we asked them why. The answers we got fell under the following categories:

1) We were too busy for your timeframe.
2) We don't respond to RFP's with no budget.
3) We don't respond to project requests with govenmental agencies.

Our impressions behind the responses:

#2 - we didn't post our budget because we really wanted to get an indication of market price to do a truly professional job (what we have now was done piecemeal over time and looks it). Later indications from those who answered #2 was that we couldn't afford them in a million years anyway. We couldn't blame companies for not responding, either: who wants to spend a week putting together an RFP only to find that the budget is $10,000?

#3 - Not sure about this one. My guess is that experience has told them that we'd be underneath what a logical budget for such a project should look like.

We've made the argument to our Board that in light of our need to increase our userbase WITHOUT increasing traffic in our already-cram-packed branches, we need a modern web platform from which to build new services. Given what we already spend on our branches, $20K is nickels and dimes...

Thanks everyone for your responses, and I'll be posting updates as I get them!