Original post by Milo Yiannopoulos via Real Business 

 

Well! What a lot of fuss there was on Twitter this week after I revealed the results of my Freedom of Information request about the cost of UKTI’s Tech City UK website. (To spare my blood pressure, I didn’t put in a request for the total cost of the Tech City project, though readers are of course free to do so.)

The response was extraordinary, with agencies, web designers, startup founders and journalists alike flabbergasted to discover that the total cost of a site clearly not fit for purpose was in excess of £50,000.

Is this the most expensive WordPress theme in history? Is the site running on gold-plated servers? Those were some of the questions circulating yesterday, as eagle-eyed readers identified the agency responsible as Creativeworks, an agency with little experience designing websites.

According to UKTI, £37,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on “website development and hosting” for the WordPress-powered site, which has been forensically examined over the past few days. £6,756 has been spent on security and penetration testing (this, at least, is a fairly understandable expense for a Government website, though I am told, given its straightforward architecture, that the price is probably excessive).

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