Today’s Telegraph has a piece looking at the large sums being spent by many councils on new or revamped websites.
In itself, an expensive website is not necessarily a poor use of funds as good, popular sites often also save costs (e.g. by reducing the number of phonecalls the council has to handle). As a result, Medway Council – one of those picked out in the article – may have a good case for spending £250,000 in revamping its site given that the last major revamp was in 2003. In the last seven years the internet has changed significantly as have people’s expectations of how information is presented online. The current site gives the impression of having additions somewhat uncomfortably shoe-horned into an old system and set of templates.
On the other hand, Haringey Council’s website is certainly a fair target of criticism:
Haringey Council spent more than £500,000 on a redesign in 2003, which included annual recurring costs of up to £200,000 per year, not including staff salaries. Haringey has admitted it intends to cut the cost of some of these services, including a £36,925 per annum contract to provide webcasting and video hosting. [My emphasis]
The webcasting cost reinforces my view that webcasting, particularly when the footage doesn’t then end up on YouTube, is the biggest mistake councils made with online engagement. Let’s hope at least that some of these funds see the current paucity of RSS feeds on council websites reduced and maybe even a better blog or two.
The Telegraph should be congratulated, by the way, for providing the background data in a useful and detailed form. Nicely done.
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4 Comments
I guess if we want a new ‘localism’ we need to stop interfering at the top level and also cut down on this type of article i.e. letting councils do as they do – they and their actions should be accountable to local constituents not the entire UK public…
Mark, I’ve just read your article “The biggest mistake councils made with online engagement” linked to from here, and have to say that from Bristol’s point of view I couldnt disagree with you more! We often have no more than a dozen public attendees at Full Council, Cabinet and planning meetings. However, our webcast meetings typically rack up 20x the average attendance, and in the case of big items (Budget setting, football stadium planning apps) we have hit 5,000+ views when live and archive hits are added together – again about 20x the actual attendance.
You are right that access and indexing if often clunky, and we’d like to see that improved in Bristol (we are using old technology that annoyingly still doesnt work on non-Windows platforms, to my great annoyance!) but the principle is rock solid in terms of reach and use. Our webcast spend is probably of the order of £30k like Croydon, but we probably get ~100,000 views a year for that; i.e. 33p per view. That’s the same as a stamp on a letter to a resident telling them what happened.
From my own point of view, I also think it’s very important that there is a proper public record of council meetings. We have no Hansard, and Cllrs will often pretend they never said things that they did. The webcast is a verbatim account of meetings and is vitally important for holding us politicians to account so that they can be JUDGED…
Sam: I don’t think localism goes hand in hand with saying “you’re not from round here, you can’t criticise us”. In fact, that sort of parochial attitude undermines one of the benefits of localism – which is that you get different policies tried out in different places, which not only hopefully better suit the local circumstances but also means people can learn from what others have tried out. That very much requires people to look and learn and comment on what others are doing.
Mark: looks like your council may be the exception that proves the rule then 🙂 Very interested in your figures. Do you have more details you can point me at?
Without knowing anything about what you’re doing, my gut feeling is still: that’s several times more than it should cost. Certainly it’s a lot more than the material costs. Contractor milking you perhaps?