Merrionstreet.ie - excessive costs?

[Irl_Designer]

Mods: Apologies if this is the wrong forum, please move if this is the case.

To begin, this is not a political, FF-bashing thread (thought I'm far from a fan of the current 'government' - but that's another days work) If it was any other political-party in power I would be asking the same questions, so let's limit the replies to design/WP-dev and costings.

As some here may have read, the Irish gov. have recently invested in a new social networking-led (twitter, facebook, flickr etc) internet platform - powered by WP. While this may be a step in the right direction, based on similar models used in UK and France etc ... I have to question the costs of this project.

The final bill for this project was €40k

Now you may call me out as ignorant on this, but I cannot fathom how a WP-powered site with minimal original design could possibly cost this amount. Granted the web design process is not clear cut (we all know this). There is a certain level of planning, brainstorming, drafts, story-boards, wireframing etc to be arrived at, aswell as content creation and usability-testing etc, but still!

Another question that needs to be addressed (one which I have received 0 responses to from the site in question) ...

1. Was a single unemployed project-manager, website designer/developer ... or anyone with a similar or useful skill set taken off the live register for this?
2. Was the option given to any media/multimedia students from our many colleges/courses to get involved? This would have had numerous mutual benefits.

I sincerely doubt it on both counts.

References:

Original Tender - Documentation

MerrionStreet.ie Irish Government News Service
MerrionStreet.ie Irish Government News Service (Irish language edition)

Politics.ie post on same topic
Silicon Republic post on same topic
Independent.ie article on the same topic
Rfahey.org independent review

Your opinions?

 

[MOH]

Eh, what now? So basically it's a civil service-run blog claiming to report "objectively" on Government news, events and issues? Which so far seem to be clips of various Brian Cowen interviews.

I particularly like the way it's so intuitive, little touches like using a plus sign to indicate that you can change the language. And all this for only €40k? I would have wanted at least 60.


It is a bit underwhelming alright, even without knowing how much it cost. I'd love to see what the traffic figures are like 6 months from now.

 

[tomed]

€40k is well over the odds for this project. Granted, we're only seeing what's been produced on the front end - we don't know what's going on behind the scenes.

 

[mneylon]

Unless they set up a special scheme they wouldn't have been able to take someone off the register to do the job
Also, as it's a govt project there would have been a tendering process, which means it's not going to be open for students

As for the costs - you'd need to see exactly what is covered - read between the lines on the tender docs and then get some questions put in the Dail about it ..