Every website costs money to build and run, and some cost more than others, but how did a revamp almost hit $100 million? It boggles the mind.
It wouldn’t be a weekend without some sort of controversy, and before the end of November, we certainly got one: the recent update of the website for the Bureau of Meteorology cost a staggering $96 million dollars. Yikes.
That’s after the flood of complaints from when the Bureau (BOM) launched the site in late October.
The original site was desktop focused, lacked the ever-important security certificate belonging in “https”, and didn’t look nice on the mobile phones we’re all relying on today. It was built for a time when the web was seen mostly on desktops and laptops, and then left to basically get older as the rest of the internet became “mobile first”.
But the new site didn’t improve things dramatically, and seemed to put only some of the information people turned to the BOM for up front. Complaints ensued, and that was when we knew the site cost $4 million to redesign.
Over the weekend, the total cost was released, blowing out to nearly one hundred million dollars.
How much does a website cost to build?
Every website also differs in what’s needed for a new website. Pickr has gone through its fair share of updates and developments, and even before that, its editor has certainly assisted with them at other publications.
But Pickr’s editor (me) also works as a tech specialist, and that means building sites, equipping them for search, and generally just understanding how code fits together where it needs to.
So I can tell you from first hand experience that every website is different, and its needs for an update and upgrade are also different.
For instance, you might just be refreshing the design, or you might be changing it altogether. With that in mind, you might need one design or a full team, and that can take time.
If you’re trying to understand how people use your website, you might need a user experience specialist, also known as a “UX” person. They’re not designers per se, but they might know how to design, because the skills can go hand-in-hand. UX people ask questions about how people interact with websites, and then answer it with flows and approaches to improve how websites might better serve those people.
Whether you’re designing something fresh or updating parts, you probably need a coder or a coding team, and these are your web developers. They’ll typically speak a bunch of development languages and will know how to join the dots between design and computer. Every website and app is built with code, and there are a lot of different languages and platforms to build things out of, each with their own specifics positives and negatives.
You’ll also need a server to run it on, the bandwidth (which is also connected), and probably a project manager or two, plus some other management people to tie it together.
And depending on how deep you need to go, there may be some customer engineering people for various components, database specialists, security experts, animators, editors, content writers, and a team building the search compatibility with the SEO side of things.
There can be a lot of moving parts in web development, and it can cost anywhere from thousands of dollars to millions depending on the size of the website.
But I am at a loss to how Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology spent $96 million on its new website. On its ill-conceived revamp that lost what was useful about the previous website and opted for something easier on the eyes, but ultimately less useful. On that. It is utterly baffling.
The $4.1 million the BOM originally quotes is somewhat logical and definitely possible, but the extra $92 million is just insane.
What’s wrong with the BOM’s revamp?
Far be it for any website operator to complain or criticise anyone else’s (but we all do anyway), the Bureau desperately needed a change on its website, or at least a slight refresh.
We’ve turned to the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive to find what it previously looked like, but the idea was simple: a weather site with a clear radar map allowing you to click where you were and get more information for that region, plus temperatures for each capital city and link to the forecasts in each region.
The design was old school and it didn’t even work properly on mobile (it didn’t resize for smaller screens), but it worked incredibly well and provided a versatile resource for people who needed it to show the map immediately, such as farmers across this massive country of ours.
Compare that to now.
The current BOM website has no map, and while it does offer capital cities, and makes it more difficult to get an immediate eyes on with the Bureau’s best resources: radar maps, such as rain, pressure systems, and the like. You can get current warnings by clicking on the warnings on the right, but they actually take you to a list as opposed to the warning, and typically show all the states.
There’s a forecast for each capital city by location, and you can even search for a location, but the map is much lower and more difficult to see.
And it feels like the BOM missed the mark on evolution.
I think a lot of Australians would have been happy with a minor refresh made to work on mobile and a security certificate, something the Bureau seems to have resisted for the longest time.
But the most curious aspect is just how the BOM’s “local” information is always a button click, as opposed to just being there.
Currently, you need to click the “Use my current location” button to load the weather, which is surprising that any user experience specialists would think that’s more useful than say simply pressing the location once per browser, logging the location, and loading the map and temperature for the location in that spot.
Why would you need to keep pressing your location if the BOM’s site could merely remember it like an app?
Aspects of the site just feel underdeveloped, such as the forecasts and observations page, which is basically just a map of the region from afar, even though there are ways to lock a map closer and show more information.
It doesn’t even render properly on one of the 8 inch foldable phone tablets we’re seeing all over the place, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 and the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold.
Fortunately, the BOM still offers its satellite viewer, available without a a security certificate like the old website, which is confusing, but at least it works. The Bureau’s “MetEye” map system is also still active, which now has a security layer, but uses the old web design and doesn’t work on mobile. It’s an utterly confusing state of affairs.
What can you use instead of the BOM website?
If you’re struggling with the BOM’s new site, you may want to turn to an actual app, which may be what the new site is trying to imitate.
There’s no shortage of weather apps, many of which have ads, and the weather app already found on every phone may provide what the BOM site is currently serving. It may even use the BOM’s actual date.
Alternatively, the BOM has an app with a map tab that can show you the information up close in some ways more reliably and better than the website, and is available across Android and iOS.
And if you have an iPhone, you may want to consider Rain Parrot, which uses hyperlocal weather forecasting to provide rain information, again with a map and a graph of the weather, plus a forecast of the week.
Beyond that, we can only hope the Bureau works out what went wrong and fixes it, and possibly spares the taxpayers any further hefty spends, because we’ve already hit a staggering level of confusion for the end result.
