A quick peruse of MySociety’s excellent TheyWorkForYou.com reveals the Conservatives have been rather busy lately tabling a raft of parliamentary questions (PQs) – several dozen in fact – about the cost of redesigning government websites.   Specifically, the sums spent by Whitehall on revamping their web offerings since 27 June 2007, the date Tony Blair handed over the reins of power to Gordon Brown.

Sure enough, the PQ responses made brief headlines towards the tail-end of last year, when the Telegraph reported that government departments had spent £4m on redesigning their websites.  The Taxpayers' Alliance lobby group immediately jumped on what they saw as yet another example of Whitehall waste, with Campaign Director Matthew Elliot commenting:  ”This astonishing £4 million figure shows departments must concentrate on content rather than the appearance of government websites. Many of these sites look a lot better than they actually are.”

However the outrage may have been slightly premature. Because since then, a further 13 government departments and agencies have come forward with details of their spending.  And as UKAuthority.com reports, their responses bring the total cost of Whitehall’s website redesigns to £10m – more than double the £4m sum previously thought.

The figures include a £513,000 redesign of the Department for Health website and £216,000 spent by the Department for Work and Pensions on a web redesign last year.  Work by the Department for International Development to redevelop its website has also cost close to £1 million, according to the figures ministers disclosed.

Some of this work was clearly important to improve the quality of government websites. For example the Ministry of Justice, which redeveloped its site last year, reported that visitor numbers to justice.gov.uk had more than doubled since the Department was formed in 2007.

Other departments’ responses were somewhat more difficult to comprehend, such as how the Communities and Local Government managed to run up a whopping £1.2m bill developing its new – and very unremarkable – departmental website. Or why the Office for National Statistics, say, needed to pay £218,000 in July 2009 to enhance its online ‘Publication Hub’, after already spending £4m on improving its online operations.

An interesting footnote to this is that the Central Office of Information is drawing up guidance to help departments evaluate whether their websites are useful, usable and deliver value for money.

This comes in response to a National Audit Office report several years ago which found ‘little improvement’ in the quality of government websites since 2002, noting around a quarter of organisations could not say how much their site cost.   Judging by a number of responses to the Tories’ PQ, many departments and agencies still can’t.  And if costs can’t be measured, can they be managed?  It might finally be time for some answers.

Government websites are to get a new set of national performance indicators to compare how well they perform against other sites, it transpires.

The 'Web Performance Management Framework' (PMF) as it is called is currently being developed by the Cabinet Office's Contact Council unit.

Details of the work were disclosed in new government web guidelines published by the Central Office of Information on 1st June.

The Web PMF, says the COI, is intended to 'enable senior management teams to review performance against their peers, and thus encourage continuous improvement within and between web sites'.  It will also 'allow for more standardised comparison of service delivery across channels; on the web, face-to-face, and contact centres.'

The document will form part of a 'suite' of PMFs intended, it says, 'to provide an invaluable toolkit for cross channel service delivery managers within Departments, Authorities and the broader public sector.'

The 'Web PMF' will thus sit alongside the Contact Council's 'Contact Centres PMF' which was published in late 2007 and sets out a list of performance indicators every publicly-funded call centre is meant to report back on each quarter.

We asked the Cabinet Office if it could confirm when the Web PMF was expected to be released, and whether this time a draft version would be made available for public consultation prior to its publication.  We have not yet heard back.

The Contact Council aims to develop a further PMF dealing with face-to-face contact during 2009-10', says the guidelines.

The COI documentation, which set out new procedures for measuring website quality, follows the COI's recent 'Improving Government Online Review' and online consultation to which 44 people, mainly Whitehall web folk, responded.

This Review is designed to act on long-running issues highlighted by the National Audit Office's Government Web Report in July 2007.  Sir John Bourn, the-then NAO chief,  commented at the time: "When I last reported on this subject in 2002 I reported weaknesses in information across government on the cost and usage of its websites. Today's report highlights that little improvement has been made in these areas."

The NAO found, among other things, that a third of government bodies had 'very little knowledge' about the cost of their websites while 60% could not report the number of unique visitors.  The upshot of this is COI have now produced a single set of website quality measures, available here, which all departments and agencies are supposed to follow.

"The Web PMF will start with and build upon the core measures proposed in this document', says the COI guidance, which is aimed at central government audience.

What the COI proposes is to put in place, for the first time, a structured process whereby government bodies will systematically supply details about website costs, usage and user satisfaction data as set out in the guidance. Importantly, these will be measured in a consistent way.  This data, says the guidance, will 'allow assessment of the overall quality and value delivered by government websites'.

The guidance stipulates departments must carry out an online of users of every website they operate at least once a year, with figures reported annually.  Each survey must also follow a given structure, with a standard set of questions worded and ordered exactly as set out in the document. Departments must complete one such user satisfaction survey by March.

The document says that 'central government departments must measure Unique User/Browsers, Page Impressions, Visits and Visit Duration starting from 1 April 2009 for every website open on 1 April 2010', as well as provide COI with details of annual website costs for the past financial year.  Agencies and Non-Departmental Public Bodies have an extra year to comply.

All current government websites have until the end of this year to achieve 'AA' accessibility as measured against Version 1 of the WCAG Guidelines, it reaffirms.

It is not stated what the COI will specifically do with the collected data, other than suggesting this would allow cross-government benchmarking and promote best practice.

And here's the link to those guidelines again.