The fees for the revamps, which come on top of salaries and other external costs, were criticised by campaigners who say the money would be better used ensuring residents have workable access to the internet.
One council refreshed the look of its website eight times in a decade, another paid more than a thousand pounds for a spellchecker that comes free with word processing software.
The wide differences between town hall website budgets - which were revealed in Freedom of Information requests by the Telegraph - suggest that some are paying well over the odds.
A redesign and revamp of the technology underlying a council website, for instance, costs half of the councils which replied less than £15,000, but the Telegraph uncovered 10 examples of councils paying between £100,000 and £600,000.
These examples are in addition to Birmingham City Council's admission last year that it had spent £2.8 million on a redesign of its website, a revelation uncovered by the collaborative investigative site, Help Me Investigate. Essex County Council told the BBC last month that it had spent £800,000 on a new website.
The spending is controversial because many people, particularly in rural areas, struggle to get online. Research suggests up to one third of the country does not receive a basic level of broadband.
"It would be sensible for the councils to plough the money into helping to improve the broadband infrastructure first before designing their fancy websites," said Henry Robinson, vice president of The Country Land & Business Association (CLA).
"Broadband access for rural areas in particular is essential for the thousands of businesses based in the countryside which are at an unfair disadvantage to their urban competitors", he said.
Some councils are pushing ahead with redesigns of their web sites even as they lay off staff.
Medway Council, which has a £6 million budget shortfall threatening up to 50 jobs, has assigned £250,000 for a redesign of its website which was last updated in 2003.
The 2003 redesign cost £600,000, despite being criticised at a council meeting last year for having "limited interactive functionality and an unsupported technical infrastructure". Simon Wakeman, Head of Communications and Marketing at Medway told the Telegraph: "The major developments in internet technology in the past seven years mean the website no longer fully meets the needs and expectations of our customers".
Medway announced in June that budget shortfalls would mean cuts of half a million from before and after-school activities, more than £800,000 from Medway’s primary and secondary schools and £100,000 from public health spending.
Another council spending money on its website under looming budget cuts is Northamptonshire Council. Northamptonshire cut 15 jobs in February last year, saving £1.4 million. That same month it finished a £450,000 revamp of its external and internal website structure, including a new intranet for staff. A spokesperson for Northamptonshire, said: "The £450,000 related to the costs of building three new websites from scratch: internet, intranet and community portal. [It also] relates to the costs of designing the sites, the content management system, accessibility testing, training, and migrating content from our old website to the new one".
Northamptonshire's public traffic figures show that the County's website is serving a very small proportion of the community. Assuming all of the site's 80,000 monthly visitors are Northamptonshire residents, only 11 per cent of the county accesses the website in an average month.
Some councils have incurred additional annual fees on top of one-off redesign costs.
Haringey Council spent more than £500,000 on a redesign in 2003, which included annual recurring costs of up to £200,000 per year, not including staff salaries. Haringey has admitted it intends to cut the cost of some of these services, including a £36,925 per annum contract to provide webcasting and video hosting. The council has already started to use YouTube, and has put the webcasting contract out to tender again. A spokesperson from Haringey told the Telegraph: "Where real savings can be made without affecting service quality, usability and our legal requirements then we will certainly look to using alternatives".
Some councils are also failing to keep track of the contracts that they hold with their IT suppliers.
The BBC learned recently that Essex County Council, with an expected budget shortfall of £300 million over the next four years, has assigned £800,000 to a new website redesign. Essex last redesigned its website in 2003: when we asked how much this redesign cost, we were told "this information is no longer held".
Other councils which admitted to spending over £100,000 on website redesigns include Bradford Metropolitan Council, which spent £400,000, the London Borough of Redbridge, which spent £180,000 and Edinburgh City Council, which spent just over £100,000.
Some councils have large, multi-year ICT contracts with third party suppliers that makes finding out how much they spent on their websites impossible. For example: Southampton City Council has a £290 million ten year contract with CAPITA; Glasgow City Council has a £256 million 10-year contract with ACCESS; Croydon spends £16 million with CAP Gemini; and Sheffield City Council spends £15 million per year on an all-inclusive ICT contract.
Content management systems (CMSes), which enable staff to update information on their websites, are an expensive part of website maintenance for some councils. Cambridgeshire Council spent £52,000 on a CMS for which it no longer holds the contract, and Chester Council spent £60,000 on its CMS. A dozen other councils admitted to spending between £5,000 and £15,000 on CMS services.
Cumbria County Council admitted that it spends £1,200 on a subscription to a spellchecker, a free feature in most word processing software. A spokesman for the Council said: "By buying the add-on functionality it meant that people didn't have to copy and paste the text into a separate document".
In total, just over 80 councils spent more than £7.5 million on their most recent website redesign.
Another 30 councils said they spent no additional money on website redesigns, with many choosing to use internal staff. Dundee Council allocated a budget of £500,000 in 2005 to redesign its website, but didn't spend the money after completing the redesign using internal staff. Leeds City Council also redesigned its website internally, spending an additional £45,000 on salaries.
A further 15 councils did not reveal their spending on website redesigns.
Top six councils for redesigns:
Birmingham City Council - £2.8 million (Completed in 2009)
Essex County Council - £800,000
Medway Council - £600,000
London Borough of Haringey - £540,000
Northamptonshire County Council - £450,000
Bradford Metropolitan Council - £400,000
Average spending on website redesigns: £100,000 (mean), £15,000 (median)
Number of redesigns in the last 10 years (from 122 councils): 285
Total spending on website redesigns (from 81 councils): £7.56 million
