Departmental Internet

Mr. Heald

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence pursuant to the answer of 1 March 2010, Official Report, column 849W, on departmental internet, what the cost was of the website redesign. (321932)

The costs of the redesigns were as follows:

	Website and URL	Cost (£)
2005-06	MOD corporate website http://www.mod.uk	400,000
2007-08		150,000
2005-06	Royal Navy http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk	270,000
2007		110,000
2008¹	British Army http://www.army.mod.uk	266,500
2006-07	Royal Air Force http://www.raf.mod.uk	119,579
¹ The British Army website redesign launched on 30 May 2008; the redesign project launched in 2006 and preparatory design work was carried out between 2006 and 2008.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many designs for its (a) internal website and (b) intranet his Department has commissioned since 2005; and what the cost was of each such design. (321994)

The following designs have been commissioned since 2005.

Date	Work commissioned	Cost (£)
March 2006	Enhancements to publishing templates and introduction of a new “Business Processes” area.	¹396,590
December 2007	Re-branding of the intranet to encompass military content.	29,238
July 2009	Complete site re-design as part of upgrade from Microsoft Content Management System (CMS) 2002 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.	²200,000
¹ Includes design and code development. ² Includes requirements capture and design.

A number of other internal websites are run by different parts of the Ministry of Defence, but these are not managed centrally. Information on these sites could be provided only at disproportionate cost. The Ministry of Defence is progressively reducing the number of internal websites and migrating their content across to the Defence intranet.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence (1) how much his Department spent on maintaining its Flickr channel in 2009-10; (322526)

(2) how many people his Department employs to maintain its social media and social networking sites; and at what cost in the latest period for which figures are available;

(3) how much his Department spent on maintaining its Twitter feeds in the latest period for which figures are available;

(4) how much his Department spent on maintaining its YouTube channel in the latest period for which figures are available.

There is no one MOD employee whose main role is to maintain social media and social networking sites, Twitter, YouTube or Flickr, although there are some for whom it is a small part of their role alongside their other duties.

My Department has spent $30 on a single Flickr ‘Pro’ licence, for the Royal Military College Sandhurst.

The official, sponsored and affiliated social media presences of the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces are listed at

http://www.blogs.mod.uk/homepage.html

Volume 508: debated on Monday 22 March 2010