It was startling to read in the Daily Telegraph that UK Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said he would be scrapping three quarters of the Government’s 820 websites. You can read the article for yourselves but it is amazing how much some of these sites cost per visit.
The most expensive websites were uktradeinvest.gov.uk which costs £11.78 per visit and businesslink.gov.uk which costs £2.15 per visit.
I did a quick search and the Telegraph seems to the the only site carrying this story. In searching I did find the following A-Z of central government websites. Perhaps we can have some suggestions as to which ones should be first for the chop.
I bumped into a pal a couple of weeks ago who spent some time doing some contract work for a government department. He was incredulous as to the level of ignorance in respect of technology. There were he said projects happening that were a complete waste of time and money. You get the impression of things being done for the sake of being seen to be doing something.
I guess this is a real problem generally for UK plc as is witnessed by the mistakes made in the Digital Economy Act – rushed through in ignorance without proper due diligence.
2 replies on “government to scrap 75% of their websites – any suggestions?”
We have said all along that government doesn’t get IT. The mere fact there are so many useless websites proves the point. They have been conned repeatedly by big businesses and ignored the techies coming up the ranks of the civil service. MPs and senior policy makers don’t understand ICT. They get their emails on dead trees and dictate replies to long suffering minions. The minions know more than their bosses. How anyone can justify spending all that money on a website is beyond me. A fool and OUR money is soon parted. Until the next gen of MPs comes along who actually use ICT themselves the danger is that these cuts may not actually cut out the crap, and it will all be to do again. and again. What a waste. I just hope that a really good person is in charge and not some dinosaur mandarin.
The same applies to the digitalbritain report, of which part was the deact. What a load of rubbish. Wonder what that cost? It has already set back digitalbritain for a decade and given ofcom another useless pile of tat to play about with to justify their existence a while longer.
chris
so which ones need the chop then? cmon.