I had an interesting piece of mail come across my desk this week. It was from the NSW government promoting the ‘2009 Youth Week Website Competition’. Basically it is asking for submissions from young people (under 25) to design the look of the website for 2009 Youth Week. A great idea.
And for the most part, it looks like a worthwhile project that some more creative students might like to take on. However, one thing did concern me a little. Under the ‘Style and Layout’ section, there is a heading on Download speed, which essentially says that the total web page should download over a ’slow’ connection in less than 10 seconds, and that the page size should not be greater than 120kb. “There should be no large images or Flash files.”
Does this ring alarm bells for anyone else? Instead of encouraging our young people to design a web site that is engaging and uses the interactive content that is so typical of the web today (I hesitate to use the ‘web 2.0′ term), the participants are hamstrung by conditions that might have been suitable 10 or more years ago, but surely not today!
Needless to say, now I’ve finished this post, the competition details will be filed in the circular file…
