WHICH WEB DESIGNS REALLY DESERVE THE AWARDS?

Have most Australian digital agencies forgotten we live in a low bandwidth society?

I am not sure wether it is denial or just stupidity but as I flick through the latest trade rags looking at the award winners for the best designed websites and see all these amazing looking Flash enabled, interactive masterpieces I get the feeling that not just the 56K users are getting left behind but now the average broadband user is too.

I have the luxury of a having one of the fastest consumer internet connections advertised as 24Meg which theoretically should enable me to download at 2.4MB per second but in reality due to distance from exchange and line length gets an average download speed of around 600KB per second. This is still much faster than a 1.5Meg connection which gets a max download speed of 150KB per second. Even at this speed I am still waiting a long time to download a lot of the latest flash websites.

Going down to my Mum's place down in SW Vic is always a good experience. She is still on 56KB. I jump on there and try to use the same websites I use everyday. Things like AFR and AFL.com.au are unusable. She uses the internet everyday just like I do but when I watch her she has just a selection of the very slimmest websites that she uses. Some of these don't look awesome but have everything that she needs. It is these websites that deserve the accolades for best design. The websites that use few or no pixels at all.

The whole digital industry in Australia needs to get back to reality and start catering to the reality of bandwidth limitations in Australia. It is going to be this way for a while so we may as well get used to it. It is one thing to have amazing looking interactive websites but when only a small percentage actually have the patience and time to wait for it to download than it kind of defeats the purpose.

Known has been focussing on creating techniques and advising its clients to stay away from bandwidth intensive technologies until Australians have access to much higher average speeds. We prefer a simpler functional approach. We are currently working on some internal projects which actually use only XHTML and CSS and use no images at all and still look great.

Brad Down
Creative Director

posted by Brad Down at 6/01/2007 11:43:00 AM