You Get What You Don't Pay For

This post is about paying for web-based functionality--plain and simple. We hooked up with all sorts of third-party solutions to get our site launched yesterday, and the cost was ZERO! In the spirit of full disclosure, in the case of two items on the list below, we have limited free trials, but even then the monthly subscription is less than half the cost of your school's admission application fee. Every time I went through the process of activating a new account for our new company, and reviewing the feature set, I was struck by the extent to which really elegant web-based solutions are FREE, or very close to free. I've been out of the school web business for three years, so perhaps I'm missing something, but I know two things to be true. First, money is tight. Second, we are now at a place where a lot of robust web functionality is available at a cost hovering somewhere between free and very affordable. My bet is that our schools are going to think twice before committing the better part of a faculty salary toward the cost of running a web system year in and year out. Here are the tools we loaded, by the way:

• post video directly to any page within our site from vimeo or YouTube.

• pull flickr photo galleries directly into any page in our site.

• create a newschoolyard branded email newsletter auto formatted with updated site content for automatic weekly distribution to subscribers, hooked to our site so that visitors can subscribe online. (btw, click here to subscribe)

• establish twitter, facebook and other social media accounts to feed directly to our site via rss.

• download and install JIng, a system for capturing and broadcasting screencasts for online training and communication.

• create an online project management system that allows us to create timelines, to-do lists, maintain design and document folios, track time, and more...for dozens of projects simultaneously.

• create an online meeting account for the purpose of providing demonstrations of our system to prospective clients.(btw, click here to schedule an online demo).

• and most of all, finally, we integrated all of these modules into a seamless website running on a spectacularly robust CMS built by thousands of Drupal developers worldwide at a cost of, you guessed it, NOTHING! What are you waiting for? Call us. Hell, call me. Here's my cell number: 401.855.1063.