Who would pay £375 per website visitor?

[Kay]

Answer - the British government. Or, in other words, some of YOU did (if you're a British tax payer.)

"At a cost of £375 per visitor, the FE Choices website launched by the Skills Funding Agency in January may be one of the most expensively pointless government websites yet."

Source: Private Eye 1317

Traffic peaked at 2,014 visitors in February, but in May only 880 people looked at it. The site cost £2.3m to create.

It's crazy. One wonders who gets these government contracts. Also, the total number of visitors to the site was 6,230. Anyone here could have done a better job than that.

[Thomas]

What a joke. £2.3m?!? That could buy enough websites to give 100 people full time work @ £20k a year. Crazy.

I think what we should probably be discussing instead, is how do you go about getting these Government contracts? The companies that get them must be laughing. Who the hell pays £2.3m for a website with absolutely no performance related payment in there? I'd be pi55ed if I paid £2.3k for a website and it only got 6230 visits, let alone £2.3m.

[tke71709]

You'd be amazed at how expensive it is to develop websites for government.

1) The requirements gathering process alone is ridiculous due to the bureaucratic nature of gov't. You try getting 15 people to agree on something, especially where no one wants to make the actual decision in case something goes wrong.
2) They don't hire 3rd world PHP developers at $12 an hour to code these things. I can't speak for everywhere but around here you're looking at least $500/day for a decent developer.
3) They have large amounts of overhead, they have a team of developers (team can be as low as two), a business analyst, probably have at least one dedicated tester, content writers, then that team needs a project manager to create tons of paper to keep the bureaucracy happy.
4) They often require that code be custom written, they rarely (again in my experience) allow open source software to be used for "security reasons".
5) They often use antiquated software (e.g. IE 7) and have to support antiquated software (e.g. IE 7).
6) They have to meet ridiculous standards in web accessibility that most people do not even bother trying to do (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Look_and_Feel)

No sane company would dare take on any sort of performance related pay for a government entity as they would have so little control over the site as to make it impossible.

[Kay]

Maybe they could have figured out if there was any need or demand for the service before they set up this apparently unwanted website. If no one is interested in looking at it, then what's the point?

[loanuniverse]

http://fechoices.skillsfundingagency...ages/home.aspx

Well I just looked at it, so you can bring down the amount per visitor On the other hand, I am in the US.

Does not look too bad. Although the answers in the FAQ could use some editing.

[Miker]

The fact its a .gov makes it worth alot more then you think. 2.3 million is not much to a government that spends that much on PR within 6 months.