Here’s a question for you, how do you spend £105 million building a website?
The answer it seems is to get some UK Government civil servants involved. The Central Office of Information have published a report on the costs and quality of selected UK Government websites in 2009-10 and it makes eye-watering reading.
The staid www.businesslink.gov.uk site cost a stunning £35 million per year over 3 years to build.
As someone who has experience in designing websites I simply cannot fathom how you can spend, in one year, £6.2 million on strategy and planning, £4.4 million on design and build and £4.4 million on testing. They also managed to spend £4.7 million in a year on hosting for a site which only gets a million visits per month (it works out that each visit to the site cost an incredible £11.78).
This is an insane amount of money for what is a rather pedestrian and basic website.
You can read more on this story on the BBC website here where they state that a similar site built for the private sector would cost nearer £1.5 million to build, with running costs of around £150,000 per year. That’s an utterly astonishing 50 times less than our Government was willing to pay and begs the question, what else are these clowns wasting our money on?