I haven't looked at the site in question, but I will say that $250k might not be unreasonable, depending on the website. Our company has paid better than $100k to produce a website that provides a service for our customers. It has a back-end database that is nearing a terabyte of data, requires 3 high-end servers to handle (and will likely grow beyond that in both number and size of the servers in the next 6 months).
All this, for a customer base of roughly 2500 companies and 10,000 individuals that use our products. You might find that expensive, but the site is top-notch, is so much better than any of our competitors that it isn't even funny, and here's the kicker - it has generated enough revenue to pay for itself many times over. Worth every penny.
So, for a website that might potentially provide services for literally hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals, that price tag doesn't seem out of bounds. I'd need far more specifics to know for sure, but depending on what the site does, $250k might be reasonable. Then again, it might not - it wouldn't surprise me to find out there was a fair amount of waste there, but probably not nearly as much as you think. We aren't talking about a mom & pop business website that can be hacked together on the cheap for a few hundred dollars here.
Just a Shooter
