Fiscal entrenchment
The economic crisis is forcing government departments to look at areas where cut backs could be made. As a result, some of the questionable web spending is coming under scrutiny.
Last issue I wrote about how Brighton Council had spent ten thousand pounds on a website to recruit a handful of executive staff. On reflection that seems quite tame compared to the £36,000 spent by Tameside Council in Greater Manchester on setting up a virtual town hall in the game Second Life.
The council built the town hall in cyberspace saying it was looking at modern ways to communicate with its citizens, but a Freedom of Information request revealed the staggering amounts of money it had spent playing the game. This included an initial consultation which cost over £3,000 and development of the project which ran to £17,000. There was a fairly reasonable £500 for a day of training and £1,500 for three days of technical support, but then the FOI reveals that they also spent £6,000 on rent for the virtual properties which included a virtual island. Perhaps most bizarre was that it spent £400 on acquiring a virtual sculpture of a black knight on a horse.
But has it been worth it? When asked how many people used the virtual town hall, the council responded "The number of visitors was not stored in the Second Life service so we do not know how many visitors there were. As interest in Second Life did not expand we decided not to go to the next stage. The site was not retained after the contract ran out on 31st March 2010". I wonder what the "next stage" might have involved? Virtual council flats perhaps?
But it is not just local councils which have spent big bucks on websites. The Central Office of Information (COI) has conducted a study into central government websites and the topline figures are that the Government has spent £94 million on web development along with £32 million on web staff in 2009-10.
If we take one website as an example, the Climate Change website, decc.gov.uk, had a development cost of £334,600, staff costs of £200,200 and a total of 1,595,878 visits over the course of the year. That equates to 36 pence for each visit. We have to assume that at least a proportion of those visitors were government officials themselves, admiring the work of the web developer, whilst others were people stumbling onto the site from Google when looking for something else entirely.
36p per visit is quite reasonable compared to some other government sites. If we look at the figures for the UK Trade and Investment website, it cost $3.9 million in development costs, and 0.7 million in running costs. With less than 400,000 visits in the year, that works out at around £11.77 per visit. The same caveats about relevance of visitor apply.
coi.gov.uk/websitemetricsdata/websitemetrics2009-10.pdf
Perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on the British Government websites. France launched its first official website to promote the nation with great pomp on Bastille Day (14th July) and it crashed within minutes of being launched. More than a week later and www.france.fr is still displaying a message which says "Site temporarily unavailable". But at least it says this in French, English, German, Italian and Spanish.
23rd July 2010
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.