Monday, May 14, 2007

Why does no one like the RAF website?

When it comes to Government websites everyone knows there are tonnes of them. We have websites for everything not just departments. They cost lots of money, and often they don't seem to justify their costs when compared to their traffic. However, the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces website in general do quite well. The main MoD website costs £177,875 per year to maintain and gets 17.6 million page views. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, at a cost of £178,398 get 36.7 million page views.

The British Army costs even less per year to run, (£160,000) and receives 52.3 million page views. All very respectable really when you do something crude and divide the cost by page views and see how much a "hit" really is. We should all feel for the fly boys at the Royal Air Force. At an annual expenditure cost of £126,860.90 (couldn't they round it up to a pound?) it manages to receive 8000 unique visits a year. That just short of costing £16 per visit.

The RAF of course always have the piss taken out of them by the other services so it probably doesn't matter that much, but it must be galling to know that the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency website (which costs only £300 a year) gets 568 more hits than you!

2 comments:

Chris Paul said...

Is it because the hits are recorded by painting enemy URLs on the side of their hangar? And the poor grease monkeys simply cannot keep up?

More likely a failure in hit counting at some level than a real reflection of webRAF traffic isn't it?

Perhaps Iain and Guido could introduce them to an effective click factory in the far east?

Chris Paul said...

Have now blogged the story here. Managed to find a fighter ace called "Buzzy" - a right charmer - but there must be a "Dizzy" out there somewhere.