[hyperpape]

I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.

But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.

A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.

[retsibsi]

Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they couldn't have been fixed in a much narrower, cheaper way.

(It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https -- but on the other hand, I can't really think of a realistic case where that mattered. And I reckon they could have sorted it out for closer to $0m than $100m.)

[brokenmachine]

>It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https

It always did if you linked to https://reg.bom.gov.au , eg https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtm... https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml

[jiggawatts]

Ironically it had HTTPS enabled and set up on the 'www' site as well, but it obnoxiously redirected you back to HTTP if you tried to change the URL. I've never seen that anywhere else, ever.