How can UK.gov spend £35m on a website?

The Register - The Central Office of Information (COI), the UK Government's centre of excellence for marketing and communications, has just published a report on the costs, usability and quality of selected UK Government websites in 2009-10. It's a detailed report and the data is available to download. It shows how the UK Government spent £94m on website development and running costs plus £32m on web staff in 2009 - 2010. By looking at the analytics it's possible to correlate the costs of building these sites with the number of visitors. One headline statistic was that the UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4m to build - so each site visitor cost £11.78.