News - Government mulls website cull

[HEXUS]

Govt moves to cut costly websites as report suggests cash was squandered on online services.

Read more.

[Funkstar]

while approximately 16 percent are were unaware of how taxpayers used them

Business Link with just over £1m consumers

A couple of corrections

[aidanjt]

I was going to say, 'how is it remotely possible that these websites cost anything close to that kind of money', but then I came to my senses and realised it's the government we're talking about.

[DavidM]

Wonder what sort of site engine they use... I mean the Whitehouse uses Drupal - so surely we'd not use anything too costly ourselves?

[Flash477]

Dang! The people who developed those sites must be sipping drinks on a beach somewhere. Those costs are just rediculous!

[MaddAussie]

OMG Thats a disgusting amount of cash, +1 for Drupal

[DavidM]

Well - even if not Droopy - at least another CMS system.

[aidanjt]

Even if you wrote the bloody things from scratch without using pre-coded components it still shouldn't cost anything close to that. But knowing the government bureaucracy, they probably formed at least 3 committees per website and contracted 'industry experts' and so on so forth.

[TheAnimus]

ah but you forgot about Accenture & ilk.

Labour party give them lots of expensive well paid contracts. They give the Labour party lots of money.

I think there really should be caps and rules against party donations, a company that receives over a certain threshold from government organisations should be unable to contribute.

Plus you'd be amazed how much money can be wasted so simply. I myself am a key cost on this turd of a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_m...re_development) which is probably going to run into costs of a few million quid before much longer. I'm also been paid as a senior architect, and no one wants myself or the other 'vets
thoughts. So currently its about 9 months of my life down the drain, 4 years, 4 re-incarnations. All failures.

Software is an easy thing to cock up on large scale.

[Funkstar]

Software is an easy thing to cock up on large scale.

Yeah, just look at Vista

(I really don't believe that, I liked it, but someone had to say it)

[crossy]

Wonder what sort of site engine they use... I mean the Whitehouse uses Drupal - so surely we'd not use anything too costly ourselves?

I'll give you pretty good odds that the combo in use is IIS+Sharepoint on Windows Server, as it seems to be pretty much standard out there. Certainly that's my experience whenever I've suggested Apache running on Unix/Linux - you get looked at in a manner that suggests they think you said "generate that website by peeing it into the side of a hill".

I'm surprised that no ones pointed out that maybe cost-per-visit is not necessarily the best metric - after all if a £10m website is slated to return £100m through a fewer highly-lucrative hits, then surely that's good value?

Seriously though, I've nothing but contempt for what they're doing at the moment - not for any political view, but more from bitter experience. I've seen "savings" applied and they seem to result in more "advisors", more admin, and less actual work. (I used to work for the group that eventually became Qinetiq - there's a case in point - thanks to John Major et al - bunch of gits)

Daresay that - as usual - fingers will be pointed at Accenture etc, when in fact the problem with government projects seems to be that civil servants are involved. Many's the time that I've seen a project go south because the Sir Humphries can't decide what they want or, more usually, they change their minds at the 25%, 50% and 75% milestones.

(And no - I don't work for Accenture, it was that they were the first one that came to mind.)

Bob