We’ve been having a look at the new, unlaunched and supposedly-hidden Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) website. We know from a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act request that NSFT paid £25,000 for its new website as follows:
“Supplier – Cloud2 Limited
Design Cost £9,350.00
Development Cost £11,050.00
Deployment Cost £4,600.00
Total Cost £25,000.00″
Our campaign has an ICT budget of £50 and no ICT staff. NSFT has an ICT budget of £9.69 million and lots of ICT staff.
Our campaign website has cost £7. Why not have a look at NSFT’s new website and tell us whether you think it is worth 3,571 times more than a website like ours? We can’t work it out. It doesn’t even work properly on a phone. Let us know what you think.
Wouldn’t the money have been better spent on front line services and a website that worked properly on small screens?
Whether you use mental health services, are a carer or member of staff, let us know your stories: we’re stronger together.
Click on the image below to have a look around the secret £25,000 website. No, we can’t believe it either:
Wow. It looks like the website was so embarrassing that they’ve pulled it. I did have a look around while it was still available to view. How on earth could anyone pay £25,000 for that?
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Its Imposable to build a website for £7, with the time it takes to add the content to it you are looking at several thousand minimum. In your case you gave up your own time to do this and thus avoided the cost!
Adrian,
Thanks for your contribution.
Of course there is a great deal of team effort and expense of time in content creation. However, the core CMS infrastructure build and design upon which this website is built took a total of twelve hours. Any half-competent technical person could build a site that duplicated the functionality of the new NSFT website in a similar period of time using open-source or closed-source software. Of course, had open-source software such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. been used the cost of the software would have been zero. It is perhaps a little unfair, as you say, to ignore the time involved, but it is hard to believe that an ICT team with an annual budget of £9.69 million lacks the capability and a dozen spare hours to build a decent website rather than pay an external supplier £25,000 to supply a shoddy one. The supplier didn’t supply the content – it was copied and pasted from the existing website.
It is a shame the new NSFT website is no longer available to view because it was of the quality, I would say, of an amateur project, with design and functionality dating to around ten years ago. It certainly was never, ever, ever worth £25,000. I’d be embarrassed to invoice anything for it, frankly.
Does the above cost include the cost of the licences for SharePoint?