How much does your website cost?

3 May 2011

Lessons from the UK government’s spending review – and content strategy

by Diana Railton 

Overview

How do you work out exactly how much your website costs – and the return on investment it provides?

While commercial organisations can track sales and conversion rates, for the public sector it’s much harder to measure value.

The larger the site, the more hidden costs there are. Especially if you have a chain of content providers putting in varying amounts of time.

The UK government’s ongoing review of all its websites, and the metrics it has set up, are a useful guide for us all. It’s also a salutary lesson in content strategy.

As content strategy develops as a discipline, it can both learn from and contribute to the exercise.

I’ve divided this blog post into three parts:

Part one: The story so far
The spectacular rise and fall of UK government websites, 1994-2011

Part two: Measuring website costs, quality and value
The metrics and standards the UK government uses

Part three: How content strategy can help reduce costs
Extra ways of making websites and intranets more cost effective

Each part stems from the sterling and pioneering work of the Digital Policy team at the Central Office of Information. They have provided a huge amount of excellent guidance in the form of Web standards and guidelines.

Working my way through all the guidance, and other extensive government documentation, has been challenging – and at times confusing. Many extra questions come to mind.

This is an attempt to summarise just some of the highlights – and how they relate to content strategy.

Go to Part one: The story so far

Published on 6 May 2011

Photo credit: Peter Pearson