The Italian government just released the new site to present Italy to the World: www.italia.it

It was developed by IBM, at the cost of 45.000.000 euro (90.000.000 NZ$) of public money, and they took 3 years to build it. As someone said, the most expensive website ever built in the world.

Being a public utility website it's amazing to see that it is not accessible (as WAI) but you need to download a few software and browse to specific sections of the site. Also, if you have a look at the code, you don't see DIVs, but just a lot of giant TABLEs. It's all Flash based...

It took 5 minutes to download the homepage from NZ. Ok, probably it due to the peak of the launch of the site, but did IBM do some traffic estimations?

And as cherry on the cake, the logo, the one you see at the top of my post, cost 100.000€. Probably a drunk developer could have done a better work than the design and brand team that designed that logo.