It's time to still the animations, crunch the applets and halt the movies. For now the great web design challenge is to make something very, very small indeed.

Canadian webmaster Stewart Butterfield is challenging the whole web to design a great web page that weighs in at less than 5 kilobytes by April 2.

To give an idea of how small that is, many pages on the web - weighed down with ever more complex multimedia elements - tip the scales at between 80K and 150K.

Is a decent looking page for 5K not impossible, then? No, says Butterworth, whose homepage www.sylloge.com could serve as inspiration to potential entrants.

"There's a lot of bloat on the web," he says.

"Last summer I found I'd lost sight of what I liked about the internet. It's not about commercial web design for big companies."

Reflecting that old-style internet antipathy towards big money, the prize for cooking up something good with limited resources is modest.

The winner will walk off with 5,120 US cents - the same number as the bytes allowed on your page.

But as well as "fifty bucks", the winner will also earn the admiration - and envious looks - of web designers world wide. See: www.sylloge.com/5k