Hi! If you are bothering to read this, that means you’re probably a person wanting to do their best to make the human experience more sustainable, for all life on Earth. Thank you!

Working in this industry and representing green and socially-responsible interests as best we can has revealed a handful of opinions around how to make our use of networked technology less wasteful. Simple choices may add up to a huge difference over time. People may initially criticize your choices, but at least some of them will be pleasantly surprised and satisfied by your explanation!

Let’s start with the web, one of the most innovation-driving inventions in recorded history. The areas of the world that don’t have internet are shrinking and it increasingly is seen as a necessity, or even a utility like water and the power that you need to light your home, let alone be online… usually, anyway.

There is a somewhat recent trend toward websites that automatically include “heavy” media, well before (and even weather or not) the visitor requests it. Sites pushing audio on you as soon as they load is one example, one that is so annoying, it’s become rare to encounter. On the other hand, large portions of a site may be flashy and m without the visitor having to do anything, and I think those may even be more unnecessarily resource-intensive and kinetic. In these cases, there is extra energy used both at the source and the destination!

This is where there’s a paradigm shift possible in considering what should go into a website, and what should not, environmentally speaking, including what might be going on at the destination device. The path between them shouldn’t be forgotten either! Personally, I find most of the design decisions a resource-light website might use are the most painless to experience. Maybe if more people include this thinking in their design process, it will become the popular thing in the future!

The first thing I want to highlight was unpopular in the past, but suddenly became the “cool” choice of recent years: dark mode! Previously known just as the quirky choice called “dark background,” it doesn’t really affect energy use at the source server, or on the path between there and the screen of a visitor, but a bright site means more activated pixels on each page. Multiply that by how many visitors you have, and with some further arithmetic, you could even quantify the energy savings vs, the average energy use of a page view.

Then, there’s the site itself. Does the page have lots of graphics? Perhaps it has some motion, too? Maybe it offers a video that isn’t playing, but which “pre-loads” anyway, just in case the visitor wants to view it, so that it runs faster and more smoothly?

I am also a big fan of recycled technology, bought second-hand or repurposed for some reason until it’s absolutely useless. A big wave of hardware threatens to fill landfills in the near future, because of Microsoft’s extreme minimum requirements for its modern windows operating systems. All of that hardware is still totally viable, if loaded with another operating system, such as any of the Linux flavors which are free to install and use. For instance, I am typing most of this article in a moving car, on a great little laptop. The charger is at home, because the battery is full and lasts over seven hours! The laptop is a 11” Chromebook past it’s End of Life for updates. I bought it online for a little over $50 and installed Linux on it! Now it’s a great little travel machine, perfect for mobile work. Assuming you upload your work to other locations, having it smashed or stolen doesn’t have to ruin your day!

Still other people don’t have the easy opportunity to upgrade to hardware (or connection speed) that can handle the totally unnecessary extra bloat that is obscuring and slowing down the transfer o the information that they actually seek! It is, I think, a bit presumptuous when people design things without considering whether those receiving it can handle it. Obviously, if someone is browsing a site to view expensive items for sale, it can be assumed that the visitors to the site won’t be on the most limited hardware or connections.. but for most other things, consideration should be taken for what might be quite limited resources on the consumer end.

These are just some examples which, without compromising much actual functionality, sites could be designed to have less impact on the planet. Just something to think about!

Do you have any other ideas on this subject? Please do feel free to leave a comment!