Migrating the Department for Transport website to WordPress
By Joe Gardiner Monday, 23rd August 2010
From the conclusions made in the article UK government’s spending on hosting and development, I decided to migrate the Government site DFT (Department for Transport) to a php application, specifically WordPress, as this is a CMS we have much experience developing and hosting.
Summary
The key points from the rest of this report follow:
Migration – We migrated dft.gov.uk from it’s current management system to WordPress to illustrate the ease of the process and that the site can be moved to an open source, free management system for very little cost. We had no access to any site files but used a small script to crawl the sites content and images.
Hosting – The copied site is now hosted on our php platform vCluster and was developed on the same platform it is now hosted on.
Expenditure – The migration and hosting process resulted in costs to us of £5000. This small investment could save up to £64,800 per month, £777,600 per annum, and this is for a single Government site.
You can view the result of the migration and our sample site running on WordPress here: DFT sample site.
Posted in Government Hosting | 5 Comments »
Does the UK Government get value for money?
By Joe Gardiner Wednesday, 30th June 2010
The COI (Central Office of Information) released the annual report for government websites at the end of June 2010, giving us an insight into expenditure for all sections of government informational websites, and analytical data such as visitor numbers.
This data has allowed us to carry out our own CatN analysis and apply our billing metrics and pricing packages to central government sites data. It is worth noting that these sites are purely static content with some search functions and other small scripts.
Posted in Government Hosting, News | 5 Comments »