This cost £100,000? 5 May 2008

Today the Scotsman exposed the latest private party in the world of public sector web site creation.

http://www.booksfromscotland.com

I had never heard of Books from Scotland until today (there is no offline marketing or strategy for it), even though I worked at a fellow Scottish arts organisation when the site had just been launched. Even if I had heard of it, I would not pay £20 for a book I could get off Amazon for £10.

And doesn’t every six-figure site have an 800px layout, pixilated JPEGs, and a minimum of 40 coding errors per page? The design looks like a wireframe rough draft. As a customer, I would look at that and say to the designer “that’s great for a start, what comes next?”

The full expose is at http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Scottish-literature-website-damned-for.4049879.jp

It’s a shame too.  It’s a great idea and it looks like a great database. But as their business development manager says in defense of selling fewer books in a year than most high street bookshops sell in a week:

“We never said sales were going to be a prime aspect,” she said. “As long as sales have been made of books by Scottish publishers, then we have done our job.”

Only in the Scottish public sector would a business development manager say it’s not her job to sell the product.  At the current rate of sales, it would take six and a half years to recoup the site’s original cost.

But hey, who needs solid business decisions - just wave the flag and the objective’s been met. And the gravy train goes on and on.