Defra has been widely criticised for spending £180,000 on redesigning their website – because it looked ‘too brown’.
Now it’s easy to poke fun here, but as web designers we’re interested how that money was spent and why. I mean, the money didn’t just go on a colour change… right?
Here’s the old site:
And the new one:
Certainly, there is a lot less brown. And it is a lot easier to use.
However:
- Search doesn’t work.
- Thousands of links are broken.
- Whole swathes of the site are still in the old design.
- The site doesn’t meet minimum standards for accessibility or code quality (W3C and WCAG compliance), which are typically essential for any public sector work.
- The templates were apparently built in Dreamweaver, a fairly amateur tool. It’s akin to finding the author reading “Web Design for Dummies”.
We found a lot of this odd – normally, we can’t do a 10 page website for a small council without more stringent quality control. I don’t believe we’ve ever seen a public sector site that doesn’t insist on W3C compliance.
So where did the money go?
£32,000 went on “web design and templates” and £40,000 on a “usability assessment”. Which leaves £108,000 for “other”, which would usually split between buying software, hardware, photography, copywriting and manually copying existing content from the old site.
It doesn’t include the cost of Defra’s own staff by the way – that’s extra.
The Defra website is big – about 9,000 pages, and 20,000 documents. However it isn’t actually that complex – most of the pages are just text, and they appear to have been copied over using an automated process (if not, they should have been).
The design isn’t bad. It’s mediocre, which is almost expected from big projects that have to appease zillions of stakeholders. A prettier design would be easy to create, but largely pointless.
No, what really captures the imagination here is just how so much money was spent. £180,000 is enough to pay 7 people £25k each – and have £5k left for tea and biscuits. That’s 7 people on a salary of £50k, working solidly for six months. While the site is better, it’s simply no way near good enough.
We don’t know if the money went into bureaucracy, launch parties or fat margins, but it could have been spent better. Defra appear to have paid out for a Rolls Royce and bought a Morris Minor.
