The Japanese Prime Minister's Website Cost $548,000 | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese Prime Minister's Website Cost $548,000

kantei.go.jp

6 pointsflocial11 comments

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It looks nice? I don't get it.

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.

source (in Japanese)

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

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