David J Rice

Belfast city council are running a competition to redesign the site for the get home safe campaign. That’s http://gethomesafe.org, no no wait only joking it’s http://www.gethomesafe.org/ yet another site run by someone without the enormous technical knowledge required to make it work without the www subdomain.

Before I get distracted, lets go over the prize £1000 plus an additional two payments of £500 over two years. Oh and guess what that means, it’s a maintenance job too. Even the fact that it is a competition targeted at students in third level education, it does distil down to a lot of cheap ‘spec’ work provided by students. It’s things like this that perpetuate the “Oh I got my next door neighbour to design me a website for £50” scenarios, and I for one don’t like it.

I also enjoyed their ridiculous but I knew that’d say that requirement, “all entries should be submitted on CD Rom along with two A4 prints of each page of the design.” haven’t they ever heard of… the internet?

Anyway, all that aside I hope the outcome of this competition is that another great designer comes out of the woodwork, produces a winning (and good) design and we aren’t all treated to another shiny piece of junk no-one will ever visit. (Just like this site you say?)