More government sites face the axe

[localzuk]

BBC News - Government to axe hundreds of 'unnecessary' websites

 

To quote one part of that article:

 

The UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4m to build said the COI.

 

Each site visitor cost the government £11.78 according to the figures.

 

What on Earth are these websites doing that costs so much!?

[joe90bass]

One would have hoped getting a massive ROI!!! But I suspect that's not been the case................

[webman]

Perhaps if the previous government had kept better control over spending and didn't choose certain contractors, then the mess they're in now might not be so large.

[localzuk]

Perhaps if the previous government had kept better control over spending and didn't choose certain contractors, then the mess they're in now might not be so large.

 

I just don't understand what could possibly cost that much to run a website. Ok, yes, it has a lot of information on it, to be kept up to date etc... but £20m a year! That's enough school places for something like 6000 kids!

[webman]

Exactly what I thought when I initially read that piece. Would love to see a breakdown of the costs!

[localzuk]

Exactly what I thought when I initially read that piece. Would love to see a breakdown of the costs!

 

If they were hiring web designers, and they were on an average of £30k a year, that's 666 people... Read what you will into that

[webman]

What amazes me is that there seems to have been zero FOI requests to the DoH to find out what on earth they're/we're getting for £60m

[john]

What amazes me is that there seems to have been zero FOI requests to the DoH to find out what on earth they're/we're getting for £60m

 

Well get on with it then

[DaveMurphy]

Most Large businesses like going for the dearest contractors even though they may not be the best ones - the more money you spend on something isn't always the best option.. They should have bought the EduGeek Joomla Template haa

[AyatollahPies]

Typical ruddy Tories! Damn you Thatcher.

 

First you take our Milk, now our Love Chips website!

 

Welcome to Love Chips!

 

[srochford]

I just don't understand what could possibly cost that much to run a website. Ok, yes, it has a lot of information on it, to be kept up to date etc... but £20m a year! That's enough school places for something like 6000 kids!

 

The £21m quoted in that report is for the NHS site and is for "non-staff" costs so I'd guess a big chunk of it is the actual hardware, data centre etc. but the Register report says Capita were given £60m for 3 years so I presume it's "non-staff" because the staff aren't employed by the NHS. Capita aren't cheap but I don't think they're the most expensive of this kind of company.

 

I have no idea how much it costs to run a website with millions of visitors - particularly one which has to at least try to be very secure - so it's hard to say if this outrageous or good value for money. You can't compare it to a school website run on Joomla and managed in odd bits of time by a few people.

 

Is anyone here involved in managing a very large website?

[TechMonkey]

I prefer this bit though

In 2007 the BBC reported that the government was to axe 551 websites, protecting 26 from closure.

Only 24 sites have been reported as closed and more sites have since been discovered and so the present total number of government websites is 820

 

How do you "discover" websites. I can picture it now, open a cupboard and there they are, someone has been hoarding those websites, making sure they don't get wet or eat after midnight. Or maybe it's a bit more like they hear them scuttling in the air ducts.

[srochford]

I prefer this bit though

How do you "discover" websites.

 

With great difficulty! In any large organisation it's likely that there is no tight control over who can have a website and there will be lots set up for particular projects. I wouldn't be surprised to find that websites exist for things which happened years ago and the website was just added to an existing server (so no real ongoing costs). I assume that the domain name won't expire if it's a .gov.uk because you're not going to have to pay an annual renewal fee.

 

A quick check says there are 368 public webservers in our DNS and we're a relatively small university. When you have huge government departments I think it's very easy for sites to get lost in the cupboard :-)

[FN-GM]

I prefer this bit though

 

 

How do you "discover" websites. I can picture it now, open a cupboard and there they are, someone has been hoarding those websites, making sure they don't get wet or eat after midnight. Or maybe it's a bit more like they hear them scuttling in the air ducts.

 

 

Just what i thought when i read it