We had for a long time been asking the Isle of Wight council how much they have spent running the council Web site.
We first asked way, way back in the middle of January this year, but despite reminders – and the fact the enquiry was covered by the ‘reply within 20 days’ FoI rule – we didn’t receive the answers until October.
That was about 192 working days (269 days) to get the answers.
How much
We’d asked how much it “costs to run the council’s Web sites” for the previous five years, originally asking for the costs to be split into running / maintaining the servers and creating and maintaining the content.
The figures that came back were combined figures rather than split.
Staff costs: £363,425
Staff costs are the largest costs, perhaps unsurprisingly, coming in at £363,425. That covers two and a half members of staff over that time.
£16K had been spent buying the server hardware and paying for software licenses.
An additional £5k has been spent on maintaining the server.
The smallest amount, £1,350, paid for the various domain names that the council has, such as the sites for Buy With Confidence, Fire Service, Eco-Island, Botanic Garden and Dinosaur Isle.
A number of sites
The amount spent covers the above sites as well as the council’s main site – iwight.com – and EduWight.iow.gov.uk.
The spokesperson for the council added the following text when providing the figures …
Areas of work covered include content creation and management, visitor enquiries, support of online services that were added as part of the statutory E-Government programme and as we have added to improve services to customers. Delivery of online services includes all technical development and integration to back end systems where this is possible.
Online payment features such as paying council tax and fixed penalty notices also help reduce administration costs.
Total spent
The IW council tells us that the total amount spent over the last five years running their Web sites is £385,775.
