Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't To Review Hundreds of Websites, Axe Many of Them
krou writes "The UK government is to review all of its 820 websites after the Central Office of Information revealed that for 2009-2010, the government spent '£94m on website development and running costs and £32m on web staff,' which each site visitor representing a cost of £11.78 to the government. 'The UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4m ... 16% of government departments did not know how their own websites were being used by tax payers, and almost a quarter were not aware of the running costs.' There was also anecdotal evidence of departments bidding against each other for search terms on Google. The review is to be carried out by Cabinet Minister Francis Maude, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, and Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox."
I'm not sure what this has to do with my rights online. This pertains to an internal governmental review of *its own* websites, not other people's.
As a web designer / developer I am always bewildered by the obscene costs I hear for government websites, especially given their terribly below level of quality and usefulness.
People with government contracts must really milk it for all it's worth.
This 'revelation' is simply another illustration of how bureaucracy works.
No one should be surprised to find competing layers of effort, working from silos, oblivious to duplication of effort when they look at this.
It's a symptom, not the issue. It's how govt. works.
Good luck making any effective changes at the delivery level...
I regret to inform you, that the UK government has recently begun conducting a review of 820 websites, and your web site is to be terminated immediately, due to excessive costs to the taxpayers.
The UK Central Office of Information recently revealed the high cost per visitor of £11.78 to our websites.
Your recent article linked to the BBC, making your web site part of ours. The BBC.CO.UK received nearly 100 million page views, referred by the slashdot.org page, costing the taxpayer £1 billion.
Therefore the Central Information Office has issued an order that slashdot.org be shut down immediately, as a cost saving measure. Please comply, or the ramifications could be dire.
Oh yes, the "joys" of the good old UK Post Office... ...a place where there are always as many closed counters as there open ones... ...a place where there is never any attempt made to stagger employee lunch breaks to take into account the fact that they are busiest during lunchtime periods... ...a place where the staff will openly moan at you if you drop in a parcel for which you have previously purchased postage online simply to try and help lessen the queues at the counters because it turns out that the actual Post Office gets no revenue from those types of parcel.
These days I go into a Post Office only when there is absolutely no alternative.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's not the contradiction that gets me - it's that anyone in gov thinks that it's necessary to promote eating chips.
Every town has several chip shops, most pubs and restaurants serve them, all the supermarkets sell them surveys show that people are eating them several times a week and some people at every (non-breakfast) meal time. They are considerably less healthy than other options ... so government are spending money promoting them and hiring (C-list) celebs to do videos and such.
There can be no one in Britain that lacks knowledge of chips.
The other more general issue I have is that the gov do individual tendering and have individual web departments to manage all those sites - they should just use a standard couple of CMSs across gov. They don't need to brand everything or have bespoke sites all the time. They should be providing information not marketing things to us.