While an iPhone app is very emotionally appealing to most people, in many cases starting with a mobile Web site makes more sense.

John Arnold of Entrepreneur.com has written a nice piece laying out the pros & cons of mobile apps vs. mobile Web sites.

I would even go a little farther than Arnold is saying that starting with a mobile Web site makes the most sense for most companies. As Arnold states in his article, extending an existing Web site to be mobile-accessible is much easier, less time consuming and expensive than launching an app, particularly if your site is running on a CMS (e.g. Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, etc). That, coupled with the tough decision of which platform to focus on (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm, etc.), points to starting with a mobile Web site.

While there are exceptions to every rule, I feel the “test and learn” approach afforded by going mobile Web site first makes the most sense.

Check out the TechPresident story on the back-end rebuild.

This is a big deal, as it is rare for large government agencies, particularly high profile ones such as the White House, to build their public-facing Web sites using open platforms.

As an agency that builds a lot of Web sites for government agencies, the White House’s decision to go with Drupal might signal a major shift in how government agencies, and their IT leadership specifically, look at open source solutions.

While we do not ascribe to the notion that open source is always the best solution for every client, we also think that the tendency for many government agencies to not even consider them as viable options is short-sited. Organizations should weigh the pros and cons of a variety of Web site CMS platforms, regardless of whether they are open source, and then the select the solution that best fits their needs.

Hopefully the White House’s decision to go with Drupal will begin to remove some of the unwarranted stigma still attached to open source platforms among the public sector IT community.

Jose Villa

The new site provide a lot of information in very engaging formats, including an interactive map and variety of reporting tools on how the Recovery Act money is being spent. It’s also a clean, organized and highly usable Web site. Federal Computer Week ran a nice piece on the site launch.

Yet, as someone who has been running a Web development firm for 11+ years, I still can’t connect the dots on how it could possibly cost $9.5 million to build. Even though it is a large, complex site, with a lot of back-end integration, a sophisticated and highly customized CMS, and significant hardware/hosting infrastructure, not to mention an aggressive roll-out (I think the site was built in 4 or 5 months), the price tag still seems way too steep.

Let’s look at it this way – assuming a $200/hr blended rate, and subtracting a healthy $1 million for hardware and software, that works out to roughly 42,500 man-hours. Assuming a 5 month timeline, that represents 8,500 man-hours per month, or 53 FTEs dedicated to the project. There is no way 53 full-time, 100% dedicated / utilized individuals were required to build this site. No way.

Kudos to Smartronix for making a lot money in 2009!