Design eco-friendly websites and minimize your carbon footprint

Web designers are being advised to go green. We receive messages everyday which advises us to recycle, use green cars and take shorter showers. As we take these steps in our daily life to conserve the environment, we must realize that the internet too has a significant carbon footprint. The internet has a carbon footprint of 830 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. The emissions are not only due to streaming, downloading and web traffic; almost 40% of the carbon footprint is caused by web designers. In current times, it is being strongly felt that web designers should create green websites – websites maintained with eco-friendly technologies.

Designing mobile first websites

Web designers are being urged to adopt mobile first technology. By adopting this method web designers can reduce the environment footprint of the websites. By making use of responsive web design, you can create an eco-friendly site.

Select methods, which are best for your environment; they will be the best for your website too. As you adopt the mobile first technology, you can create websites which can deliver information across a large number of devices and various platforms. It is advisable that you create quicker websites with faster load times.

Reduce the carbon footprint

You can go green by enabling servers to get powered with alternative energy. You can offset your websites energy usage. Using renewable energy and offsetting dirty energy use is important.

Another way to reduce your websites carbon footprint is through the sizing of your page and through selection of design elements. By reducing the size of your pages, you can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of a website. You can adopt a page size budget system and sift across the website design elements. Choose what is very important for success of your website and sacrifice those that are not very important.

By sizing your page and selecting design elements, you can design a green website which has low carbon footprint.

Adopt energy efficient technologies

Simplifying your designs is very important. With each server request energy is consumed. The larger the size of the transfer greater is the consumption of energy. Elegant and simple designs can be energy efficient and effective.

You can minimize your website’s energy usage by posting fewer images, which have lower resolution.

You should use few Java Script widgets and should not adopt too many resource-intensive technologies.

You should also speed up your site so that not much energy is consumed. The greater the time your site takes to load more is the energy consumed.

Select right content

Small steps from your end can bring about big changes. Content is an important aspect of website design. By adopting a content first approach, you will be able to decide which text, images and videos are of importance to your target audience.

It has been found that images are the prime cause of carbon footprints. Large un-optimized images should be avoided. If you are a web designer, you should ensure that the images are optimized for the web. You can use Adobe to create images with the right size and correct formats. Calculate the average website design cost before designing your site.

Design a lean website

With green website design technologies, you can reduce you carbon footprint and ensure that the faster load times benefit the users. By creating printer friendly versions of content, you can also reduce wastage of paper and ink.

By designing an environment-friendly website, you can contribute towards a healthier environment. Use green web designs to reduce the negative effect of web processes on the natural environs. Adopt a green attitude and design less complex websites.