Hello and welcome to issue 8 of Beneath the Surface! After a long winter hibernation we are back to dig into the world of sustainable web design and come together to untangle the green web.
🔋 Are Grid-aware websites the future of sustainable web design?
The Grid-aware websites project is an experimental (and exciting) new approach to sustainable web design proposed by the Green Web Foundation that considers how websites can be served more efficiently based on the the intensity of their servers local power grid.
We are super excited about Grid-aware websites and think it could potentially be the biggest evolution of web design since Responsive Web Design.
When it comes to Sustainable Web Design, your web hosting package plays an important role in reducing the amount of energy required to run your website.
As well as running well optimised servers, the geographic location of the machines that store your website also plays a key role. Generally speaking, the closer the server is to the people who visit the website means there is less distance for the data to travel ‘over the wire’ to reach their devices and therefore uses less energy to do so.
The Green Web Foundations new work now asks us to consider another important condition when choosing where to host a website: How clean is the energy that powers those servers?
For more, head over to our blog: Are Grid-aware websites the future of sustainable web design?
🌃 Using Dark Mode to make your website more energy efficient
This issue we are also revisiting our article discussing the benefits and pitfalls of Dark Mode. Research by Android Authority back in 2020 found that a whopping 82% of people will choose to use Dark Mode on their devices whenever it’s available.
Since then, it’s become increasingly common for websites to be designed in both light and dark colour palettes, giving visitors the power to choose their own viewing preference.
There are many benefits to using a Dark Mode colour palette including reducing battery usage by up to 63% and being easier on the eyes of your readers.
However, when designing websites we need to consider any accessibility implications. And this stands true for a Dark Mode-only design, too.
Read more in our blog: Using Dark Mode to make your website more energy efficient
🍄 Unearthed
~ Digital sustainability news, insights and tips from around the web.
Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team
Here at Root we build all of our low-carbon sites using WordPress so we were shocked earlier this year to hear that Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has shut down the WordPress sustainability team.
WordPress is by far the most used Content Management System in the world (used by roughly 43% of ALL websites) so ensuring it’s core software runs with a low environmental impact is crucial.
Many WordPress developers have spoken out about this over the past few months with Hannah Smith and Chris Adams of the Green Web Foundation providing two of the most succinct explanations of what’s happened.
Clean Creatives Yearbook
Clean Creatives is a project aimed at PR and advertising agencies who aim for a safe climate future. It names and shames those agencies within the creative sector that work with world destroying clients, mainly in the fossil fuel sector. As creatives who have the power to create advertising and marketing for any type of client, something that we fully support is refusing to work on any project with a company that owns, supports or produces fossil fuel.
And something that Clean Creatives do well is promoting their important pledge. Their ‘Yearbook‘ names CEO’s of some of the largest creative agencies in the world that are working with fossil fuel clients. All in the style of a school yearbook. Large scale posters were then put up in the areas that were significant to each CEO during their childhood. This gives them a sense of innocence that has been lost in their latter years of company ownership.
DesignWhine Digital Sustainability Edition
The UX design magazine DesignWhine recently launched a special Green Heroes edition, The Driving Force Behind the Digital Sustainability Movement. It features articles from many leading voices in the digital sustainability world including Thorsten Jonas of the SUX Network and Tim Frick of Mightybytes
Green Web Tracker
Running your website on web hosting powered by green energy is a key part of maintaining a small digital footprint. The Green Web Foundation recently launched the Green Web Tracker, a public index featuring various types of sites listing whether they run green hosting or not.
Not for this first time this issue we’re completely bemused by the number of the Moz Top 500 most visited sites using fossil fuel powered hosting.
Slow.tech
Slow.tech is a manifesto proposing how society can rethink our systems to drastically reduce our impacts on the environment and our dependence on high tech (before the planet literally runs out of natural resources to make computer chips). Interested to see how this develops!
☀️ Studio News
- Root is growing! Chris Seed recently joined us as Creative Director.
- We recently launched a new low-carbon website for the carbon neutral video production company Sustain Video.
- Food distribution charity FareShare gets in front of his majesty on BBC News.
- Our website for Furbellow & Co got some love on the Hubspot web sustainability blog.
- Our website consultancy offerings are great for those in need of a review or a little help to direct your path to a sustainable website.
💚 Thank you for reading
This issue of Beneath the Surface was written by Paul Jardine and Chris Seed. We’ll see you for issue 9 in the summer! ✌️