Website Costs

The following are estimates of the annual cost of operating this website, which is managed and hosted within the County Council.

Many of the costs will be estimates as for efficiency reasons the staff, technology and services are also used for other services such as the County Council’s Intranet (for our staff) and other information or IT systems.  

The figures shown below indicate the costs attributable to the website for financial year 2010/11.

There is a group of dedicated staff who spend a significant amount of their time managing website content (£200,000). There is another much larger group of staff spread across the County Council who spend a small part of their time producing, checking and updating website content - it is not possible to estimate the cost of their time.

We host our own website using a commercial Content Management System, which was purchased several years ago. We also use an internally hosted search engine, an online forms package, a secure online payment facility, and a speaking website function - the costs of supporting these applications is circa £12,000 p.a.

The costs attributable to the website of services provided by specialist ICT Staff are approximately £65,000 p.a.

There are costs for the maintentance of servers (hardware) which are used to deliver and support web services which is approximately £17,700 p.a. This is for 14 servers plus several databases.  The development support service and database costs approximately £3,100 p.a. Annual staff costs to support the server and database infrastructure costs £13,000 p.a.

We have a number of ways of monitoring the usage of this website, this includes: a feedback on the page function, web site log file usage analysis, availability monitoring, and a survey of users. The total cost of these services is approximately £9,000 p.a.

The images and documents on the site are mostly produced in house and we do not record the time spent making these specifically for the website so we can not attribute a cost to them. The Council’s website was redesigned in 2010 and the design work and ICT developments for making the changes were all managed in house using the same staff that supports the ongoing website developments, so there were no additional costs in respect of the redesign.

As well as providing information online there are also systems that allow you to access services online, such as, library book renewals, job applications, the payment of invoices and parking charges.

In most cases the system provides both an online presence and functionality, such as processing data and reporting functions so it is generally not possible to separate out the cost for supplying the online element of a service from the overall process. For these reasons it is not possible to provide a cost for these online services.