There has been anger within EUSA over the association's recently relaunched website, after it was revealed that the redesign had cost £26,000.

The deal covers the new design of the website, modeled on the look of EUSA's The Voice publication, and will keep it operational for three years.

However, questions have been raised about the wisdom of spending the money. According to EUSA's financial results, the association barely broke even in the past year despite large grants from the University.

In addition, £10,000 was spent on a rebranding package launched in Freshers' Week, featuring a new logo and poster campaign.

EUSA President Adam Ramsay has defended the website spending, telling The Student: “The old website was little more than a signpost to EUSA services. The new website is a EUSA service.”

He added that he expected EUSA to benefit from increased advertising and revenue from selling university merchandise online.

External Convener Thomas Graham has attacked the decision, saying: “It's a huge amount of money to spend on a website. It is important that when EUSA is in financial difficulty that we spend the money wisely. £26,000 is a lot of money.”

Oliver Mundell, a member of the Committee of Management, told The Student: “£26,000 is the level of debt many students leave university with, and is not a sum to be taken lightly. While I agree the new website, given the wealth of talent at Edinburgh, this should have been looked at before outsourcing.”

He added that he was concerned about delays in the website launch, which had been scheduled to be ready by Freshers' Week, meaning that the new site launched approximately four months later than planned.

The decision to update the EUSA website was originally made at the General Meeting in spring 2006, with the associated spending decisions made by union sabbaticals that year and last year.

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In contrast... Jack Schofield (84.19.226.xxx) 2009-02-03 16:19:51 EUSA should probably of considered using an open source CMS like Joomla. I understand that they no doubt wanted very specific features, but I'm confident if they had used a framework like Joomla the production cost would have been significantly reduced. Both the UN and Harvard use the system after all ;) http://www.unric.org/ http://gsas.harvard.edu/ Reply 1   2

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