The web design field has a wide breadth of service offerings from free design and hosting services; to small companies who charge a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; to large full service agencies equipped to provide design, hardware, database, migration and backend support which will run you from the mid five figures to beyond.
Websites are no longer just fun, flashy graphic eyecandy. Organizations rely on their websites to market their services, engage clients, sell wares, host databases and more.
UPDATE AUGUST 11: Here is a 4.5 minute CKNW radio interview on this topic:
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When it comes to a municipality redesigning their website you can count on five things:
1) improvements to their current site’s design and function will take place
2) some people will love the new site, while others will hate it
3) real features constituents want (e.g., paying taxes directly on the website; online application forms; real time online communications; etc) will be limited or missing
4) the cost will be grossly inflated
5) the Government bureaucrat who has to explain to the press why the project cost what it did, will really have no clue what he / she is saying or be REALLY condescending…or both
On Wednesday the City of Vancouver released their latest website design – their fourth in the last ten years.
The design and navigation are a vast improvement; integration of outside payment modules (e.g., paying for a parking ticket) were well done and the cost – $3 million (and in fact, folks are telling me the current actual cost is $3.3 million) – is, well, exorbitant. And I am not alone.
Noted Vancouver blogger and web designer Rebecca Bollwitt – aka @Miss604 – wrote:
In my very unscientific poll, 95% of designers agree with me and Rebecca that the City of Vancouver overpaid for their website while the remaining 5% are clearly out of their minds. Again, please note I do not do scientific polls, just like Forum Research.
Laurie Best, Vancouver’s director of the city’s web development project, told the Vancouver Courier:
The cost is just over $3 million. About half of that was for the technology side (hardware, software and customization) and about half for three years for salaries for 20 staff, extensive research on what worked and didn’t work for people (research found little actually worked well for people), design and development of the look and feel ($40k), templates, writing the information, consultations and focus groups, staff training and detailed testing.
So you may now be asking, “Dave, you sexy beast, what SHOULD that website have cost?” My answer, $861,000 or 23% more than Surrey.
How did I arrive at that figure? By comparing the City of Vancouver site to two other municipalities; tapping into my knowledge of how Government spends tech money like drunken monkeys; and mostly opinion which is of course inflated by my self worth. Or as Chief Financial Officers call this process, forecasting.
The City of Coquitlam launched their re-built website in February 2012 at a cost of $260,000. So how does it compare to the Vancouver site? Acts and feels the same. Sure, IT nerds will point out the differences between hardware etc – but really, who cares?…unless it costs 1,200% more.
What is important is function, usability, security and that the Mayor’s photo is totally everywhere on the site. In these regards, the two sites are the same with Coquitlam having 1/12 the cost.
Moving over to the City of Surrey we learn that they spent $700,000 in 2011 for their website. Golly the look and feel is darn near identical to the Vancouver site. Wow! Even the Open Text content management system (CMS) is a mirror image. All for less than a quarter the cost of the new City of Vancouver site.
Weird!
Or is it so weird the two sites are so similar?
It seems the same company – Yellowpencil – built both websites.
Yellowpencil’s description of the Surrey site project is almost the same as the City of Vancouver’s. The specs, design elements, function, etc.
Of course there ARE differences. Namely, the Surrey site is mobile friendly and the cost of an app was part of the price tag while Vancouver’s site is NOT optimized for mobile phones nor did the $3 million+ price include a smartphone app.
From all the above we have hit the first 4 of the 5 points in my checklist. What about point 5? How is the City doing communicating with the public?
Yesterday Ms. Best was on CKNW’s Simi Sara show. Best explained that the site now had better search capabilities and was translated into 50 different languages. Wow! That IS impressive…until you learn that the website uses FREE Google search and translation plugins which take about 10 minutes to install and configure.
When Simi asked how could the City of Coquitlam site cost $260,000 with VERY similar functions, backend, etc while the Vancouver site is $3 million plus, Ms. Best replied, “The City of Vancouver is a bigger city with more complexities”.
Ummm…ok…but that is not REALLY how web development works. The cost of the site is NOT determined by population or land mass. If that was the case, I guess the Canadian Goverment’s website should cost $30 billion.
Did the city of Vancouver over pay Yellowpencil for their services? Maybe.
Over pay and/or get needless upgrades for the CMS and hardware? Totally.
But where did they REALLY get shafted? In the words of Radiohead “you do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts“.
What I mean by that is, look at the line item “research”. When the numbers come out, I guarantee you will find $1 million or more under this column. If itemized, watch for a whack of Vision Vancouver (the political party running Vancouver’s City Hall) supporters and their companies listed as “consultants” or “advisers”.
Also watch the cost of this site approach $4 million before the end of the year. Stay tuned.
So what do you think? Money well spent? What do you like / not like about Vancouver’s new website?
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This is embarassing. 50 languages refers to programming and coding languages.
Stop now :s
Ah! Well, then I am looking forward to relearning BASIC and FORTRAN.
And don’t forget about ASSEMBLER and COBAL
I’ve worked in web design for 17 years, and up until two years ago I would have been in the 95% of web designers who would have said the City of Vancouver paid too much. However, after spending the last two years in developing from the ground up a new website for the small graduate college I work for, I can say that my knowledge of the costs involved in developing a major website from the ground up for an educational institution (which share many similarities with governments) was woefully inadequate. Especially these days, where people demand that a website do much more than they would have even five years ago. 95% of web designers do not work on jobs of this magnitude, and therefore have no idea of the costs involved. This isn’t a job WordPress is going to be able to handle.
The Province has a good article that details some of these costs. You can view it at http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Independent+expert+Vancouver+million+city+website+makeover/7067703/story.html. A few highlights include details on the contract paid to Yellow Pencil. Out of the $3 million, their portion came to $674,649. That covered the cost of developing the CMS and long-term support. This is in line (and in fact is a little less) than what the City of Surrey paid for their contract with Yellow Pencil. This is, perhaps, a more apples-to-apples comparison between the two.
So where did the other $2.5 million go? According to The Province article, over half went to hardware, software and customization of the site over the three years of development. Customization is a key word. Any city systems that interact with the new website have to talk to the CMS, and these customizations can get very expensive very fast. Top quality programmers do not come cheap, and neither does the enterprise-level software needed to make it work. I know that from experience.
The other half (again, according to the article) “went toward the salaries for 20 staff and general planning for the relaunch, including the research study, holding consultations and focus groups, and training staff.”
I have to wonder if the people you talked to at the City of Surrey and Coquitlam factored the costs of all the work, hardware and software not provided by Yellow Pencil (or its equivalent) when they spoke to you. In order to get a true cost comparison between the cities you would need to get a precise breakdown of all the services provided and the costs involved.
I’m not here to defend the City of Vancouver’s new website design. In fact, I see some problems, especially the fact that it’s not designed with mobile devices in mind. That’s an oversight for sure. Nor am I a supporter of Gregor Robertson or the Vision party. I’m not even a Vancouver resident. However, as a person with a lot of experience in the web field I can say this article needs to be much more thoroughly researched before I can give any credence to its conclusions.
Ken – you bring up many good points in your comment. Thanks for weighing in!
The biggest problem is that the City of Vancouver has not shared the project scope in any detail. As we know it ALL the hardware, etc is exclusively for the website. With what we know, that does not make a lot of sense. It is the equivalent of buying a Ferrari when a Hyundai will do.
As well, the number of staff assigned to this project coupled with the additional non-staff “research” line item is extra financial padding. My conversations with folks at Coquitlam and Surrey indicate that Vancouver’s time frame, expense and “research” are out of line for what they did. Again, Surrey’s website was developed by the same company who did Vancouver’s – and that bill was 1/4 the City of Vancouver.
The website is needed – the cost is not. As I mentioned in my article, the cost is NOT $3 million, it currently sits at $3.3 million and folks are telling me that $4 million is where it will end up.
Once the City of Vancouver releases the final and detailed billing they will either be vindicated or vilified. Stay tuned.
Dave said: “It is the equivalent of buying a Ferrari when a Hyundai will do.”
That’s almost EXACTLY what Vancouver does. Translink needed some vehicles? Rather than some hybrid camries or something sensible….Brand new Dodge Chargers with custom paint. Thanks Vancouver for spitting in the financial faces of the public, then crying when you run short on important funding. This city BADLY needs an audit and to clear house of those in official positions that let these things happen.
My hope is the new Municipal Auditor General as proposed by the Provincial Government uses this website case as one of their first examples.
I will say that 3 million dollars is a lot of money, and it is possible that The City of Vancouver did overpay for it. But I will also say that as a Designer / Developer with a number of years of experience, unless you know the complexities behind what you see on the front side of the website, that I don’t know that for sure. And I will say certainly by the way that you’ve come to your conclusions by a very surface understanding of the complexities, that you don’t know that either.
I’ve recently finished a contract as a developer for a company that made software that ran as a service through a website, so most people would say that we were ‘designing a website’, and equate those skills and services to those that you would find in a typical one or two person web shop: installing an existing CMS like wordpress and customizing the look and feel with photoshop, adding and importing content, customizing the look and feel and interaction, billing and calling it a day. Not that there’s anything wrong with this work (I do this work too), but I think experienced software developers (which this project needed its share of) would have a differing opinion on the cost of this project versus your unscientific poll of designers.
Here are three key things that make any software / web design project complex:
1. working and dealing with legacy technology and systems
2. having multiple data sources and many places that all must communicate with each other in synchronicity
3. working and dealing with legacy technology and systems
Seriously, working and dealing with legacy technology and systems can be a nightmare. Sometimes many different technologies and programming languages are used. Most of the time they were poorly written and patched together the first time. This makes it hard to understand its internal logic. Sometimes it makes it impossible to make changes. A lot of time the technology used is out of date and falling out of use. And a good software architect has to understand every. last. bit. of. it. And then, in order to bring it up-to-date and add new features and make it able to accomodate change in the future, they have to rewrite it all or a lot of it. They have to holistically understand it and ‘architect’ a framework to integrate it all together. They could do a complete rewrite and a typical website user would not even know the difference, and exclaim “what did the city pay all the money for? I don’t see the change!” Not to downplay the design side, the information architect and a good design personnel deal with all this complexity from another point of view.
Anyway, I was once on a team of designers and software developers. We built a website (software service), and our team was about 15 people. An average salary there would have been about 60k. Some people probably made much more, some less. The project originally built with on one technology, we moved to another, and we needed a sub-team who understood the old technology, and one that had expertise in the new. They had to work together to figure out how eventually to evolve it (over a period of years!!!) to the new platform.
15 people @ 60K per year over a period of three years is 2.7 million dollars. You could see how that adds up fast and we were a single product with a single service offering with backwards compatibility on one legacy platform, and developing a new technology platform. The City of Vancouver’s website is likely more of a mess at the start of its re-design. Bring into that probably 100′s of constituents that all have an important service that needs to be provided or communicated by the city through its website, and it’s already a complicated mess. Have financial transactions that are currently being processed through an independent technology or platform, but need to integrate it with the new website? Screw that up and you’re talking real financial repercussions for the city. You have to get it right, and like it or not that takes time and money.
But otherwise, it’s just re-designing a website. And why should that cost a lot?
Jason – thanks for your insight!
I do agree with you that a website is more than what one sees – the backend and architecture is key to getting security (especially with data and financial transaction) right.
The City of Vancouver website has been re-designed four times in 10 years so legacy issues / porting / etc (one would assume) with this version should have been minimized.
Also – according to the City’s specs – very little sensitive data is connected to the site design and NO financial transactions take place through the “new site”. Paying for parking tickets or permits, etc. involves using a pre-existing system on a sub domain (with a graphic user interface – GUI – from the 1990s) or using an outside processing service.
So again – I am left confused as to why the Vancouver site costs $3.3M vs the near identical City of Surrey site built almost at the same time by the same company came in at $700k.
I suspect the differences will be in over priced and overspeced CMS and hardware along with an outrageous “research and consulting” fees line item.
When Rebecca Bollwit demonstrates that she has an understanding of what it really takes to build a full web presence that interconnects with disparate legacy systems instead of that bullshit wordpress thing she runs, maybe she should chime in. Until then, she’d be better off keeping her mouth shut.
Darcy – I do not believe one has to be intimately involved in every detail of a project to have the knowledge to know if the task is overpriced or not.
Rebecca’s (and mine for that matter) knowledge of the industry as a whole, many specific projects and connections with large scale agencies who have completed projects / tasks you outline allows us to chime in that $3.3M for the City of Vancouver site is overpriced.
In fact even folks who share your sentiment believe the project was overpriced.
I am curious on your opinions on the City of Vancouver site / costs / specs.
I didn’t say she had to be involved in “intimately involved in every detail.” I said she lacked an understanding of what it takes to build a project of this scope.
I’ve met Rebecca and it’s fairly obvious that her level of technical knowledge ranks somewhere close to my mother’s. Her opinion on this project isn’t an informed one.
I’ve no doubt the City’s project went over budget. Any project with that level of bureaucracy will almost inevitably run long and over budget, despite (or because of, if you prefer) having a level of professional Project Management involved.
For $3.million, I’d expect it to be uber-accessibile. Sadly, it fails on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level A, the most basic accessibility requirements.
From what I can see, the City of Vancouver website scores 100% on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 Level A using the test found here:
http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php
Interesting. The WAVE found 26 accessibility errors on the home page. It’s too flipping hot to manually check the code, which is the ultimate test.
Four for you Glen Coco! You go Glen Coco!
Darcy – We try to limit the obscure Mean Girls movie quotes here.
These are interesting “conclusions” from your article:
“Did the city of Vancouver over pay Yellowpencil for their services? Maybe.
Over pay and/or get needless upgrades for the CMS and hardware? Totally.”
I’m going to go ahead and assume that you have a detailed knowledge of the hardware that the City of Vancouver is currently running on. I mean, you probably don’t…but let’s just assume that you do.
The next assumption I’m going to make is that you’re aware of the details of how the project was managed including contract details (fixed rate vs. time and materials) and change requests made by the city which may have had an impact on the site’s features and functionality and therefore had an impact on Yellowpencil’s time.
So, obviously they overpaid Yellowpencil. It’s not possible that the problem was a badly managed project. Not at all.
Darcy – I thought I made it clear in my piece and radio interview that the project was badly managed. If that point was missed, I will say, I believe the project was badly managed.
“Why pay $260k or even $700k for a website when you can pay $3M like the
City of Vancouver | Dave.ca Communications Inc.” was indeed a delightful article, cannot help but wait to examine much more of ur
posts. Time to spend a bit of time on the internet hehe.
Thanks for your time -Elsa
This is exactly the fourth article, of your blog I personally went through.
Yet I really enjoy this 1, “Why pay $260k or even $700k for a website when you can pay
$3M like the City of Vancouver | Dave.ca Communications Inc.
” filmania the most. Thanks -Hazel