What's in a R6.5 mil website?

Recently Durban in South Africa paid R6.5 million for the development of it's 2010 showcase website. Now this seems quite excessive, so how do you get to a price like that?

There was an article about this published on IT news website, ITWeb. According to them the site has a live webcam which will keep visitors to the site up to date with developments at the stadium. The site also boasts interactive postcards as well as a gallery.

After visiting the site, all I can say is, it does not look much different from any other open source content management system I have seen before. Who knows, maybe there is more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye? From a web designer point of view, I cannot really say that the design is much to write home about and lets not even talk about the HTML running the site.

I wrote about this on my blog, R6.5 million website. If you have a moment, please check it out and leave a comment. I am very interested in hearing what people have to say about this!