A post on Arran Eco Savvy is long overdue! Somehow this wonderful website has slipped through the net and I’ve not made a post specifically about it despite it being one I’m tremendously proud of.
Winning the tender
When I saw the invitation to tender I knew I had to win this bid – to use it as a platform to create a bespoke low-carbon website – and simply to help this very worthwhile charity. At the time we were only just starting to understand the environmental impact of digital carbon. But on a personal level, I had been blogging furiously on Little Green Ways for years and was deep into assimilating environmental changes in my own life – I couldn’t wait to get started helping an organisation which I much admired bringing my professional life in alignment with my own values.
We were very inspired by the amazing things that Arran Eco Savvy did. We knew that they would be on board with the idea of a low-carbon website and would immediately understand its importance. We were ecstatic to win the bid.
Arran Eco Savvy low carbon website redevelopment
Ivanna worked hard on creating a design which was both beautiful and yet low carbon. Using all the techniques she knew how to wring every last byte she could out of it. We used colour and code to ensure it looked vibrant and yet remained lightweight. We had lots of techniques to reduce the number of images used while still making it look lively and the dark colour scheme would draw less power on the user’s device – saving power/carbon there too. Meanwhile, Annelie streamlined and whipped the content into a robust structure and I worked on testing out some of the most lightweight coding options to bring the site life.
Working with Arran Eco Savvy
Throughout the process, the Arran Eco Savvy team worked closely with us and happily adapted all of the suggestions we made to ensure the content of the site remained low carbon and used the nice display tools we created to keep it looking interesting throughout. It really was a team effort.
The fantastic result
A low-carbon website
The finished result went from a staggering 16g of carbon per page hit to around 0.2g – 80x smaller than the original website. The content reorganisation meant users could find what they were looking for much more easily – achieving their goals with fewer page hits compounding the great result!
Which loads really fast
The amazing benefit of a low-carbon website is that the attention to detail makes it lightweight, and also makes it perform really well.
Further Information
We were happy to write a more in-depth article on Arran Eco Savvys low carbon website over on their blog. Since this project we’ve taken on several more low carbon websites.