Westfield High School class seeks clients for free website design service
Published: Jan. 04, 2024, 1:13 p.m.
By Amy Porter | The Westfield News | aporter@thereminder.com
WESTFIELD — Bram Moreinis, a new computer science teacher at Westfield High School, has brought with him a tech internship program he developed during his teaching career called “Free Web Clinic,” in which students develop websites for small businesses and community-based organizations.
The WHS Free Web Clinic is a work-based learning project within the school’s computer science program of studies, where students design and manage individual and group projects. The Web Clinic team will use professional tools and work patterns, learning together and collaborating to build or upgrade websites for clients.
Moreinis said he will be starting a new round of the Free Web Clinic at the beginning of February and is looking for a pool of prospective clients that could use the help.
“We will choose the ones where we feel we can make a difference,” he said.
Prospective clients can visit freewebclinic.org and complete a “free consult” form, sharing their needs. If they’re a good match, Moreinis will put together a student team to work with them.
“Ideally, if we had 12 people fill out the free consult form between now and Feb. 1, we would end up taking four to six, and would have their websites by the middle of June,” he said.
The total initial investment by the client is four meetings with the student team. The first meeting will be a “discovery” meeting to get a full sense of the scope of the job. The student teams will present ideas based on data shared on the online form, and the clients will share their own needs and desires.
The second meeting will take place once the team has a design for the new site sketched out with a sitemap, wireframes and a theme for the client’s approval.
Moreinis said the students will then develop the site, usually in WordPress, on their local platform. He said a third of the websites on the internet are made with WordPress, an open-source product with free and paid options.
At the third meeting, which he calls the “alpha” meeting, students will take feedback and change requests from the client on the website in progress.
At the final “beta” meeting at the end of the semester, the students will present what they have accomplished to the client. At that time, if the client wants to keep the website, Moreinis will transfer the website over to a new hosting company, which the business or organization must pay for. If the client does not want to keep the site, the team will find out why not. Moreinis said that has only happened once in his experience.
Moreinis said hosting and fees for “plugins” and “themes” for a WordPress site range between $50 and $200 per year. The team will recommend hosting, plugins and themes for each site, and clients will purchase what they need directly.
Clients may also choose to take the work products to other developers, learn to work on their own, or hire the students on the team as outside contractors for $25 an hour to support their work, which he said would be outside of school.
“We want to build the program and tell other people about it,” Moreinis said, adding that for the students, it will be an opportunity to add their work to their portfolios for college or internships, or for their own “metacognition” — defined as awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking processes.
Moreinis has been working with students and technology since 1997, when he started an afterschool IT service learning program called “Tech Scouts,” where students would earn merit badges for making websites, fixing printers, and setting up projectors. In 2005, he created “Game Face Web Design” with ex-students and adult employees, creating websites for small businesses and nonprofit organizations in New York state.
After moving to Greenfield, he ran Tech Scouts as a summer program focused on making websites for local nonprofits, including a Girls Club, the Recover Project, and Franklin Hampshire Youth. As an adjunct professor for Greenfield Community College, he formalized the Free Web Clinic model as an experimental alternative to the college’s traditional web development course. Since then, he has run the Free Web Clinic twice: at a vocational school in Vermont, and most recently at the Springfield Renaissance School.
Moreinis said at Westfield High School, he’s found a whole new level of excitement for the program. He said his supervisor Lauren Cadigan has been very supportive, as has the tech center, the principal and assistant principal.
“I love the place. The people really care about each other, the students, the faculty, and the administration. It’s a really, really warm connected community. The kids enjoy coming to high school. They’re very, very respectful. It makes you feel like good stuff is happening — just the culture of the community,” he said about Westfield.
Moreinis acknowledged that websites are not as critical to a company’s success as they used to be, and it may be that some businesses have survived without one by just using a Facebook page, or have let their website become outdated.
“The sky’s the limit — if you have an organization and made a website a while ago that needs updating, we will give it a refresh,” he said.
He said for his students, it’s not so much about the coding, but the development and the design, learning about how to deliver what the clients want to accomplish.
“The students can give you their takes on websites,” he added. “They have been going through it their whole lives.”