You might have heard or read about 10 Downing Street's new cheap-as-chips WordPress website, but did you know that it cost the taxpayer £100,000? Mike Rouse is furious:
News reaches me via a friend that the 10 Downing Street website refit to WordPress cost in the region of a shocking £100,000. What’s more, however, is that the theme for the site (according to a scoop on Dizzy Thinks) has actually been taken from another website and then had Crown Copyright applied to it.
The 10 Downing Street website went for the first option - to pick a theme from the web and hack it around. I would charge a few hundred quid for this, probably no more than £500, but again depending on the complexity and time consumed. Presuming the 10 Downing Street brief was quite complicated let’s say it took 40 hours of work to complete. That would have cost £2,000 at the most if they had come to me.
To hear that it cost in the region of £100,000 is frankly disgusting and a rip-off for the tax payer. I wouldn’t dream of charging my WordPress clients that much money for their blogs, the design, the maintenance and the hosting that I provide. If they were charged the same I would feel like I had ripped them off. The fact is that they also simply would not pay that kind of money. They’re not stupid and know that the whole point of going for a WordPress solution is because it is affordable and represents good value for money. 10 Downing Street, or rather us the taxpayer, has been fleeced.
Hat tip to The Devil's Kitchen
7 comments:
holy crap, that's INSANE. Some designer saw an email saying "10 Downing Street, website needed" and saw pound signs. And they paid for it? Granted, a lot of work DID go into it, but not £100,000 worth. A couple of those and you could retire.
Dammit, if Plaid wanted a website, I'd do them one for nothing. I'd consider it national service. I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to fleece them.. erm.. us.. erm.. me.
:-(
You mean you heard it via the Wardman Wire!
You mean you heard it via the Wardman Wire!
Actually no I didn't. I heard it via Devil's Kitchen.
Nice work if you can get it,eh!
Mind you although Dizzy broke the story I think maybe that it was built using a free networker-10 Wordpress theme (albeit heavily modified) was proven and exposed by our very own Cambria Politico Welsh poliblog! Congrats to them.
And its not bilingual either. But then, they did only spend £100k on it, unlike the £1.2m the EHRC spent on their site, which is coming up on its 1 year anniversary of not having equality for Welsh!
Has anyone been able to get an explanation from the EHRC for this? Every reason I've been given has turned out to be an untruth (I hate the word lie!), I even filed a formal complaint, but have been unsuccessful in even getting that acknowledged!
Sorry to go on about this, but I saw them on the Maes this year - that presence alone must have cost them more that it would take to sort the problem out!
That is an outrageous amount of money especially as the site now looks rather amateurish to me! I much prefer the way it was before!
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