A report published last week by the Central Office of Information (COI) contained some truly shocking numbers.
In just one financial year (2009-10), the government spent £94 million on building websites – and an additional £32 million on paying people to keep them up to date.
No wonder the new coalition government is so keen to make cost savings. These numbers are a reflection of the way governments spend money, but they’re very different from the way the web development industry usually works.
In other words: just because the last government spent millions on small websites, it doesn’t mean you’ll have to.
A good website developer will work with you to deliver a return on the money and time that you invest in the project. That’s central to our thinking here at Boson. It’s not just about what a website costs, it’s the reason for doing it and the projected outcome.
That’s what’s missing from the COI figures. There’s no way for us to see what measurable impact those expensive websites had. Along with the costs, that’s the kind of information the government needs to be collecting.
On a slight tangent, the new government has opened up some new sites for public consultation recently – programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk and yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk – and at least one of them is powered by WordPress, a free open source platform. That alone is a sign that someone considered the projected outcome at the start, and the website has been built accordingly.
