

The Japanese Prime Minister's Website Cost $548,000 - flocial
http://www.kantei.go.jp/

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jasonkester
As developers, when we see something like this, we have two responses to
choose from:

a.) Outrage. How could this possibly be??? I could have built them this site
in _four hours_. This sort of thing must be stopped.

b.) Joy. How awesome is my life that I work in a industry where I could
conceivably bill _half a million dollars_ for a simple website. Gotta work on
my networking to make sure that I'm the guy they hire to build version 2.

I think that, as computer folk, we have an unfortunate predisposition to
Reaction A. I'd suggest, if you can stomach the idea, manually shifting your
outlook on life to more closely line up with Reaction B. Life gets a lot
better if you do.

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chc
I think the trouble is that, for many programmers, "work on my networking" is
on the same level as "grow an extra pair of arms" — might be handy, but no
idea how to make it happen. So they resent those who do know how.

(I realized this might sound kind of condescending, so to be clear: I am in
the category of "couldn't network his way out of a paper bag." I just realized
a while ago that resenting people who are better than I am at some things was
counterproductive, and it's better to watch and learn.)

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swalsh
548k actually seems about right. I think a lot of us would be surprised how
much a professional CMS integration can cost, as well as how long it takes to
do it right.

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lallysingh
Yeah, plus, if you imagine it's got data retention or security requirements
like other governments here. That can really knock up the price, especially if
there are conformance tests in the contract.

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rplnt
These "overly expensive" publicly-paid sites often include from scratch
creation of extensive content management system which requires a lot of work.
That being said, most of the money is often spent on maintenance and running
the site. I.e. it can contain 5 years warranty, 5 years of hosting, guaranteed
availability and scalability, and so on... (even telephone support in some
cases).

Don't know if this is the case though. I'm also not saying it is a good thing.
In my opinion, ordering site like this is just a way to steal more money than
you could with a custom wordpress site hoste on a shared host.

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samuli
Not knowing Japanese it's hard to evaluate the site for its entirety.

Often though, technically minded people tend to overlook the work required to
organize and produce quality content on the web.

They might have content roadmaps made, pre-planned topics to write about
during the year. They might have created a communication strategy, including
stuff like how to react on current events in Japan and "the tone of voice"
when writing to the public.

They might have trained the a number of staff to use the authoring tools and
so on.

Doing the CMS integration is usually the easy part of the project.

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crikli
Government sites are expensive because of all of the hoops that must be jumped
through. The increase in administrative load over a normal corporate client is
at least one order of magnitude.

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GiraffeNecktie
Well I've been on a govt contract to build a little intranet website (and do
some other work) for nearly five years now and we're just getting to the point
where the software might be possibly getting close to maybe tentatively
getting approved (barring yet another rotation in management, shift in
priorities, change of scope etc.) So yeah, half a million for a government
site is cheap. Dirt cheap.

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dguido
It looks nice? I don't get it.

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bmelton
Agreed. It looks solid, and (while I was admittedly just making a red-tape
rant in another thread,) delivering an attractive website for a government
entity that cost less than three quarters of a million dollars is something of
a feat in my opinion.

That this isn't particularly ugly or broken in some way is what's surprising
to me.

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flocial
source (in Japanese)

<http://jp.wsj.com/Japan/Politics/node_419085>

