Take the City of Coquitlam's new website and multiply it by 15. That's how many civic websites Graphically Speaking could build for the $3 million the City of Vancouver paid other unnamed developers for its new website.
"We were shocked about the price tag of $3 million," said Darrell Hadden, president of Graphically Speaking, which developed Coquitlam's new site for $200,000. "At first look, I find the price of $3 million quite high, and so do most of my peers."
What baffles Hadden and others is that the city's new site is not optimized for mobile – something of an oversight, they say, given that 45% of Canadians now own smartphones.
A city hall spokesman told Business in Vancouver the cost is not out of line with other municipalities, like Calgary, which also paid $3 million for its website. In June, Hamilton city council approved a $2.4 million budget for a website revamp.
"Overpaying for things and misuse of public money is not unprecedented," said Dave Teixeira, a political and tech news commentator.
"I'm just baffled as to where they spent all this money, especially when you have two local examples – of the City of Coquitlam and the City of Surrey – spending far less money, and they both have mobile apps."
However, he said the new website is a vast improvement over the old one – easier to navigate and well laid out. But he and others – including city councillor George Affleck – wonder how the city could have spent $3 million on a website.
The City of Surrey spent $693,000 on its new website in 2010, and Coquitlam paid $200,000.
The design portion of a website can range from $2,000 to $60,000, according to one recent estimate. In Vancouver's case, the city paid $40,000 for the website redesign and development.
It was the custom content management system (CMS) – used to manage daily website content – that appears to have taken the lion's share of the budget, according to a backgrounder posted by the city.
In 2008, the city approved $2 million for tighter security and new CMS for the city's website. The CMS ended up costing $1.5 million.
According to the city's backgrounder, a team of 20 people spent three years converting 60,000 web pages to the new site.
Terra Cochrane, managing partner with web design company Tidal Interactive, said the $40,000 the city paid for its basic website design is not unreasonable. She added that some of the back-end work for the various city organizations and community would have been enormous.
"Three million dollars, it's hard for me to say if that's justified, but I'm not surprised," she said. "If I look at the back end, and the functionality within booking systems for each and every property or community centre, that's huge. That's a lot of work."
Jordan Bateman, B.C. communications director for the Canadian Federation of Taxpayers, said a quality website is crucial to serving and communicating with the public, but he added that the city needs to be more transparent about the website's budgeting.
"A website is essentially a tool for transparency in government – and yet how the money was spent to build it is shrouded in mystery."
Affleck said he will ask staff for a detailed breakdown on the website's budget and an explanation of the tendering process at the September 18 council meeting.
