From the title you can automatically tell that it is for a government website somewhere. There have been examples of this posted on HN in the past like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327184

I was just wondering if this is a norm to do websites at a cost of a nice apartment.

Holy Shit, 200K for this. Daimn !

I could have built a better one for the half price.

Should I saw 'wow'? Or am I missing something?

No, but "Wow, that's a rip-off" would fit.

Ok... i've seen this a couple of times now.. someone please explain to me the point of base64 encoding parts of the page and saving them in hidden fields? It's not as if you can't decode, rewrite then re-encode that. Maybe it's just an Active Server thing?

Also, now I feel like an idiot for building Wordpress sites with custom themes and plugins for under a grand. Clearly I need to get me a government contract :/ .

That's the way ASP.NET works when using WebForms. If you notice, the entire page is always a Form.

Oh. Ok. I thought it was some kind of page validation thing.

I'm sure there's a perfectly valid reason for it that's not insane.

Very 1997.