I have an average of 26.19 visits per day across the life of my blog despite the first nine months having virtually no hits due to me not linking to my site anywhere outside the forum where it initially lived. If I only included the time when I had links to the outside internet, I’d have at least double the traffic count of Charlie Gordon.

Granted, I don’t know how big or web-interested Charlie Gordon’s constituency is, but surely he should be able to do a better job than this. He could start by getting a standard free blog platform and template and using half-time in Queens Park matches to update his site. He probably lists his phone costs under “call handling” anyway and it would cost him about £1 a match on pay-as-you-go. That’s £2 a week to sort out his site content and he’ll have a better site than he does now. Plus he’ll never complain about how long the gaps between halves are.

Also, he could justify having what appears to be a Queens Park FC season ticket in his political expenses, because he’d be doing some proper political work in that time.

If Charlie thinks this is a good idea, he can contact me and I’ll give him whatever help he requires.

* – “Call handling” sounds like it might be a telephone service provided by GMG. Hopefully it is better value for money than the website.

I’m taking on the contract for a different MP, wordpress install, and am doing it for the same amount as it’s what I compete with. I personally dislike PRAI sites, but they’re improving constantly and it’s a successful business, my dislike is appearance and design, not functionality, which is effective.

If you want an all singing and all dancing site, you can pay loads for it, but for most MPs a fairly basic site with static content and news/blogging functionality is fine, you can always pay for extra plugins for WordPress if you feel the need.

Given the hosting for that sort of traffic is going to be no more than £5 per month, that’s £20 per month for very little real work unless something goes wrong.

I’d also noticed the £11.80 payments to Queen’s Park FC…. what do you suppose that’s for?

FWIW when I was in the public sector (choke, gasp) the community development agency I worked for spent a five figure sum on a website revamp without ever checking the analytics on the existing site. When I did, and cleaned out all the stat rubbish to reveal a whopping eight external hits per week, the cost per visit on the new site was £1,800. After I left the agency in disgust, they then spent something like £60k rebranding the agency and commissioning a whole new site a year later, knowing full well that they would be merging with another agency a year after that and rebranding/redesigning yet again. Three site revamps which probably totaled over £100k for a site that nobody actually wanted. Welcome to Scotland.