Half of Whitehall's websites axed in a year

The government has claimed to have almost halved the number of Whitehall websites over the past year. Its annual Central Government Websites report, published by the Cabinet Office, says that 444 are now open compared with 820 a year ago. The closure programme is part of the government's campaign to reduce spending while …

[Captain Scarlet]

Waiting to see the

Domain has expired and then blame it on the new web host and domain agreement.

Hmm I seem to be using Eat this a lot.

[James 51]

Maybe I am missing something here but how does folding a website into another one save money? I am assuming of course they diidn't have dedicaded servers with expensive SLA.

[Richard Bragg]

This is government. Of course each little web site had its own server with its own team and all developed in its own silo.

[frank ly]

"... a single government web domain ..."

... and in the darkness bind them.

[The last doughnut]

I can't imagine why something as enticing as governor.gov.uk wasn't the massive hit we all thought it was going to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

How

How does closing three websites but retaining the content in a fourth actually save £1.7m?

How much does HMG pay for hosting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: How much does HMG pay for hosting?

I was once involved in a £70m infrastructure procurement for an HMG website. It was a very strange experience.

Silos are not necessarily more expensive. If you develop in a silo you don't have to waste man-centuries getting sign off on requirements from committees, stakeholder panels, focus groups.

Value would be better measured by something like cost per visit. It's very crude but a lot less crude than cost per domain name.

[mark 63]

main website?

"All the relevant content has been moved to the department's main website."

Well thats a fiver a year saved on the domain name

Hurrah the economy is saved!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're looking at this from a simplistic and sensible approach

You're missing the cost of the development hardware/software licensing, multiple test environments hardware/software, storage for all the above charged at x per month, test and dev support services, live web servers, HIDS, NIDS, load balancers and whatever else the supplier can convince them they need.

[Tubs]

Last time I looked, many of the sites were hosted in the U.S.

No wonder the country is broke.

[Starkadder]

But it's not

Broke.