Blog of a crazy man

I thought I’d write a few words on designing websites to be eco-friendly (I stole the term from this guy). Most people don’t think about a website being eco-friendly, but the truth is most aren’t. When information is sent over the internet energy is used. Energy is also used when a person views the website because the person’s computer uses energy to display the site. This energy comes from power plants that may pollute the atmosphere. One big contributor to website generated pollution is websites that use excess images, this means more information sent and thus more pollution. Another big contributor to website generated pollution is the use of automatically playing media files. These files are not only annoying to the user, but also wastes energy on something which will only result in fewer people returning to your site. Probably one of the biggest contributors to website generated pollution is bad code. Many websites use sub-standard code, this code causes large and unwieldy documents which results not only in more information sent, but also in poor rendering on the receiving end which makes it harder for the user to navigate the site thus wasting time as well as extra energy by forcing his computer to stay on longer while the user navigates the poorly designed site. If you want to design sites that are both attractive to your users and eco-friendly you should try to design clean fast interfaces using standards compliant code and use few images and media files.