One of the things that I think might help with looking at this is to stop thinking of it as a website.
What is being produced is a tool to manage the activities that we as an organisation take part in. That could be done as a bestpoke app you down load to your phone, or a spread sheet, or as we have chosen, a website. It is a tool, nothing more nothing less.
In all of this, the actual cost is the thing I have least issue with. I know what these things cost, I know how much I would charge to do something like this, and it's not far from the ballpark of what is being charged (assuming it's a team of about half a dozen people). What I do question is the way it's been managed, and the tools that have been used. I'm seeing the words "lock-in" and "dependency" appearing in meeting minutes in the next few years.
Again, hosting isn't the problem, and that would be easily solved for something within an order of magnitude (either way) of ~£1000/year. That's not what is costing £250k.
Oh agreed, I've not seen a breakdown of how the costs work out, so don't know how much the host ticking over is as a cost of the whole thing. My reason for mentioning it is that my my area of specialisation. It's the area I am most qualified to comment on.
There are several problems with the old/original site, not limited to:-
d) There are various back office interfaces that could do with improvement (membership, organiser, reporting, etc)
e) The front end could do with a revamp and modernisation
I feel that for many people e) is what they see most, and feel is the sole aim of the new site is to make it pretty, not helped by the fact that phase 1 appears to have done only that. I'm a grumpy old fart that hates most of what is considered to be modern web design, so there is very little likelihood I would ever have been positive about the cosmetics of the new site.
What I do object to is when design principle of Verschlimmbessern is used. For pretty much every usecase I have with the AUK website, the new site has made it worse/harder. But then I have yet to sign up to an AUK calendar event.
I appreciate I am not the typical user tho.
The big problem with a) and b), is it makes no visible difference to the end user, That makes it a very very hard sell.
A lot of this thread feels like stopping and asking for directions
"Hi, I'm trying to get to London"
"Oh, I wouldn't start from here" *walks off*
I'm not sure what the solution is.
J