THE LOCAL government website dorsetforyou.com has been redesigned three times in the last five years and costs more than £350,000 annually, according to figures released in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Questions were sent to councils across the country by The Daily Telegraph and PeoplePerHour.com, and the nationwide results were published this week.

Birmingham City Council’s last re-design cost £2.8 million.

The average (mean) is £100,00, or £15,000 (median).

Dorsetforyou’s last redesign cost £3,404.  

Since the questions below were asked Purbeck District Council and North Dorset District Council have agreed to join dorsetforyou, so costs will have changed.

But what’s below (provided by a communications officer at West Dorset District Council) still provides an interesting snapshot.

Note: One reason for dorsetforyou’s re-designs has been that it used to have very low user satisfaction ratings, ie people didn’t like it and couldn’t find what they wanted. These days, the scores are higher. Overall satisfaction has gone up from 15% two years ago, way behind other councils, to 37% now, just ahead of other councils (Thank you to Kirstie Smith of West Dorset District Council for pointing out that a whole range of statistics can now be found at http://www.dorsetforyou.com/successmeasures)       

1) How many redesigns has the council website gone through in the last 10 years?

Dorsetforyou.com is a shared website for four Dorset councils; Christchurch Borough Council, Dorset County Council, East Dorset District Council and West Dorset District Council.

Producing info for all four partners since they created their websites would take too much time. Therefore the following info is since April 2005 when the combined website was born.

Dorsetforyou.com has had three redesigns, the original one in April 2005, one on 30 June 2008 and the most recent in September 2009.

2) How much is spent annually on the website, and for what tasks?

Figures for the 2008/9 financial year are as follows:

Development: £46,394 (Tribal and GOSS)

Design: £6463 (GOSS)

Hosting/co location: £15,180.33 (GOSS, Tribal, Trading Eye)

Domain registration: £200 (estimated)

Licensing/support/analytics: £21,373.96 (GOSS, Smartlogic and Matraxis)

Staffing (central team): £157,913.28

Updates/changes (internal staff time): £100,000 (estimated)

Consultancy: £9,400 (e.g. Shawtrust, SiteImprove)

Other: £4737.02

TOTAL: £361,662

3) How much was spent on the most recent redesign of the website?

£3404

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