UK.gov websites cost £208m per year
And then there were two
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The UK government is spending £208m per year on running websites but many of them are text heavy and crammed with policy information that citizens couldn’t give a monkey’s about.
The figures come from a report from the National Audit Office, which says that the government has made progress in making information available over the web, but that the quality of its sites hadn’t improved much since 2002.
Some online services have been embraced by the population, it would appear, though the figures the NAO uses are slightly confusing.
At the same time, many departments didn’t have much meaningful information on how their sites were being used. No surprise really. Of course, many wouldn’t have much to shout about - after all some sites barely trouble the public consciousness. Who can forget remember www.ukworldheritage.org.uk, which pulled in just 77 visitors a year.
Things are changing. Whitehall is sliming things down so that the UK’s citizenry need only negotiate two “supersites” in future – directgov and businesslink.gov.uk.
So, rest assured, that once all the “customer—facing” arms of government are shoehorned into one site and all that troublesome “policy” stuff is stripped out, the UK will have just the sort of informed citizenry the current government feels it deserves.®
COMMENTS
Morons?
Isn't `Information Technology ´and UK Gov in the same sentence an oxymoron?
Re: www.broxbourne.gov.uk
The fun thing about this site (other than my proximity to broxbourne...) is that every part of it smacks of incompetence and design by committee.
Yes, they've used CSS. One tick point
Yes, they've fulfilled some of the *automated* accessibility checks. Another tick point.
Shame they forgot about a few of the others...
* Appropriate use of CSS (you never need pointless OnFocus, OnBlur, etc scripts just to change colour)
* Applied accessibility testing by somebody with more than one braincell
* Used JavaScript for important things, with fallbacks when it's not available. Oops, disable JavaScript and the menu doesn't appear...
* Produced a design that is actually visually appealing and doesn't look like it's been knocked up by a "talented" 12 year old child of a council member (talented, in this case = knows how to program the video recorder)
Mind you, I'd rather they didn't waste millions of our money on pointlessly flashy and essentially unusable websites and used it for important things instead. Like education, health, police, etc.
Institutionalised brains
I worked on directgov. The idea was great, but the copy was gathered in from all the Gov't departments and most of these insisted that the content go in as delivered. Swore it had been signed off by lawyers and not a comma could be altered. Also did not get that it was complete rubbish. My favorite was on buying a used car, which did not tell you the legal steps you had to take (the forms required, etc.) but simply warned about buying stolen vehicles. It was as if they couldn't understand that they had to say real things. My first and last job for the Gov't.
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