§ Matthew TaylorTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what the cost in(a) financial and (b) other terms was in (i) each financial year since 1997 and (ii) 2003–04 until the latest date for which figures are available of (A) developing and (B) maintaining (1) his Department's website and (2) each website for which his Department is responsible; and how many (C) unique hosts and (D) hits there were in each month for each website in (iii) each financial year since 1997 and (iv) 2003–04 until the latest date for which numbers are available. [155853]
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§ Mr. HuttonInformation on the Department of Health's web site and those for which the Department is responsible, has been provided where figures are readily available. More historic data can only be provided at disproportionate cost.
Unless specified, costs exclude staff overheads as it is not possible to provide these without incurring disproportionate cost.
Usage figures are quoted in the currency in which they are collected and include page impression, visits, hits and unique visitors. Where multiple currencies are collected, visits have been used.
Department of Health's Website(s) doh.gov.uk and dh.gov.uk
The Department of Health's website (www.doh.gov.uk) was established in June 1995.
The cost of the Department's website is shown in the table.
Financial Year Total cost £000s 1998–99 219.8 1999–2000 313.7 2000–01 457.1 2001–02 658.9 2002–03 722.6 2003–04 1663.0 1estimated costs to end of March 04—excludes development as this is covered in the DotP project costs These figures include hosting and maintenance, development and dedicated staff costs (using agreed Civil Service Staff costs including salaries, common services etc.) Costs for earlier years are not available separately from the Department's total information technology costs.
The Department launched a new website on 16 February 2004. It is available at www.dh.gov.uk. The old website was migrated onto DotP the central government content management platform. DotP has been developed in partnership with, and hosted by, the Office of the e-Envoy. The full cost of this major project is given below, and include costs associated with the project which would not be incurred annually.
Financial Year Total cost £000 2002–03 1,121.4 2003–04 2,136.8 The Office of Government Commerce provided hosting until the end of June 2002. While its website was 1834W hosted at OGC, the Department used page impressions rather than hits as a measure of usage. The figures are available in calendar years only.
Calendar Year Page Impressions 1996 1200,000 1997 1520,000 1998 4,533,775 1999 16,485,398 2000 37,504,218 2001 48,337,144 1 These figures include both static HTML content and web accessed database content. Website usage for 1996 and 1997 is estimated (based on average weekly figures). Between June 2002 and February 2004, EDS Ltd was the hosting provider for the Department's website. ED provided monthly service report that included a we performance return in which traffic to the Department website was measured in visits.
Month Visits 2002–03 Visits 2003–04 April 1,151,556 May 1,194,097 June 1,016,406 July 782,398 1861,325 August 700,015 1791,160 September 709,406 1,191,141 October 872,988 1,401,520 November 968,069 1,441,587 December 682,138 1902,998 January 1,061,220 1,069,467 February 1,018,692 March 1,171,181 1 Some data is missing for these months due to a technical fault within the reporting tool. It should be noted that these figures do not include hits or visits to any of the 60 plus web accessible databases/which form part of the Departments' site. Hits for these databases are currently averaging 3.62 million per month.
Information on other websites for which the Department is responsible has been replaced in the Library.