Yeah, so I'm talking first about why we're here today. As a digital agency owner, who builds the internet for a living, and I think most everybody on this call is probably somehow some way related to, you know, building digital products and services. I started learning around 2010-2011, about the internet's massive environmental impact, and wanted to do something about it. And so really started thinking about how the products and services that we at Mightybytes designed for our clients can, in turn be made to reduce emissions and address climate change and issues of sustainability. And so over the past decade or so we've been evolving and tweaking our process, to make sure that the work that we do is is better for people and for the planet, as well as for our customers and their users. So next slide, please.
There you go. Thanks. Thanks, Nicole. So today, we're going to just talk about kind of what came out of that for Wholegrain Digital, who's across the pond from us in the UK, and the practices that our two agencies have put together around applying sustainability principles to digital products and services. So next slide, please, Nicole. Tom, I'm gonna throw throw this your way.
Yeah, thanks. So I mean, over at Wholegrain, we've been massively inspired by what Mightybytes have been doing for about a decade and, you know, being way ahead of the curve, compared to the industry at large, and we're really kind of following in their footsteps trying to get up to speed with this concept of sustainable web design. And really, what it means, in essence, is, an approach to designing digital services that puts people and planet first I mean, we're obviously, you know, traditionally in digital projects, we're talking about business requirements and user requirements. But at the core of that, like any form of good design is like actually design is responsible for society, design that is responsible from an environmental point of view. And I think it was must have been a couple of years ago now we teamed up and Mightybytes Wholegrain and, and some other people in the industry that are sort of thinking along these lines, including some some people who I think are on this call, and created the Sustainable Web Manifesto, which had six, six principles. And you can you can read these in more detail at sustainablewebmanifesto.org. But the principles are clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient. And we'll go some of the through some of these things in the latest slides. But essentially, what we're talking about here is clean energy. So renewable energy sources powering the web efficiency, in terms of minimizing energy use wherever possible, open and honest, that kind of largely, like tie this in with the human aspect of design. But also, you can have environmental benefits as well in terms of sharing knowledge and resources and avoiding, you know, greenwash which, which is sort of one of the, the hazards of sort of green design. And then regenerative is really about thinking about, you know, what is the impact of these products, not just in terms of kind of technical, like energy or carbon impact, but also like, what's the kind of bigger impact on society and the environment and is the is the cost of what we're doing having a net positive impact on the world. And, and resilient is about making sure that things are a fit for purpose that the people can use these things can use the products that we make in the places they need them when they need them. So that's a very kind of quick, top level overview of the Sustainable Web Manifesto principles.
Nicole, can you advance to the next slide? I think this is the this is the screen grab of the actual manifesto itself. Anybody can sign it. So if you're on this call, and have not signed the sustainable web Manifesto, please do it. As Tom said, it's at sustainablewebmanifesto.org. Next slide, please. So per what Tom was just saying, there are a bunch of strategies that we came up with, for sustainablewebdesign.org we mighty bytes, put sustainablewebdesign.org out in 2013. But at the same time, we released Ecograder another tool that we worked on. And like I said, we earlier we've been kind of tweaking these, these these approaches to what we do for a living and and coming up with some kind of broader categories. So when we redesign sustainablewebdesign.org The categories that we came up with, which are also relevant in Tom's new book, were: design client and project ethos, so like, what is the actual thing that your project is promoting and stands for, content and marketing, so the idea being getting people efficiently to the cut to content that they need, web development, hosting, and then, business operations. Next slide, please.
We are at the open discussion of some of these topics now. So to open this up, I thought that it might be interesting to just meditate on this opening quote that we have, "good design is as little as possible." Tim, can you tell me like what that means to you necessarily?
Sure, yeah. So so when I was working on Designing for Sustainability, one of the biggest things that I wanted to get across was that good UX practices, and more sustainable UX practices, are really about helping users accomplish the tasks they need to as quickly as possible. So while Dieter Rams quote is, you know, relevant to architecture, since he was an architect, for those of us who build digital products and services, it's really relevant in terms of making sure you know, if you're putting together you're not putting obstacles in the way of users and getting them to come to fill out forms, or whatever it is that they need to do, that you're there doing that as quickly, as efficiently as possible, and that there are no barriers to being able to do that. Tom, do you have anything you want to add to that kind of general philosophy around you know, what sustainable UX design would be?
Yeah, and I think it's very much kind of a less is more approach in a in a sort of holistic, sort of minimalist principle across the board and in what we do in digital. So obviously, like user experience, like Tim says, keeping those keeping those experiences really streamlined, but also just in terms of things like the detail of our aesthetic designs, and what are we including in them, because that all of that information adds up, both in terms of mental clutter for users, but also in terms of like information that has to be stored and transmitted. So I think just sort of keeping sort of minimalism, and less is more as a sort of overarching principle is, is really beneficial for people on planet.
Yeah. Next slide, please, Nicole. So for each of these, we decided, you know, we only had an hour for for a webinar. And as you can probably imagine, each of these, you know, six principles or six strategy categories, has a lot underneath them. And in fact, the website that we've been working on is very much a 1.0 release, we plan to add a lot more content to it to make it more useful. So you know, these examples that we're going to talk through are really high level and purposefully, so because we could spend several hours talking about each one of these. However, the idea is to get across the basic concepts. And in each of the sections on sustainablewebdesign.org, we list several resources for each. So in terms of optimizing design assets, it's really about like compressing images, compressing videos, making sure everything is optimized for performance across, you know, platforms and devices as possible. Prioritizing colors that use less energy. So you know, different, lighter, lighter, lighter colors, like white white backgrounds and stuff on OLED screens use more energy, reducing steps in UX tests, as I mentioned earlier, reducing the number of custom fonts that you use, respecting user privacy, I think that's, you know, there's an efficiency thing there, if you're not respecting user privacy, you're pulling a lot of data that maybe you don't need, and that your, your, your users don't want you to take. And so making sure that that's, that's a really key and important element to the work that you're doing. And then finally, you know, putting this in here, accounting for human and non-human stakeholders. So I think, you know, in our UX practices, where we're kind of it's drilled in us to be focused on users. And that's really, incredibly important. However, you know, there are as the whole purpose of this conversation, nonhuman stakeholders, like the planet that are involved in our projects, whether we know it or Like it or not, and so making sure that you're taking that into consideration, sometimes, some of the things that we found helpful in early parts of projects, and just in conversations about projects is, you know, kind of just mapping out who the stakeholders are and what the ecosystem looks like and such. Tom, do you have anything to add to this in terms of the high level design strategy examples?
I think that's a really good overview. And I think I think again, you know, it's just about thinking through every detail, one of the things we found is that attention to detail is really the key and kind of the design but most of this stuff isn't isn't a high tech inherently It doesn't matter. necessarily require, you know, sort of new skills or specialist tools. A lot of it is just spending the time to really think about every detail and ask yourself, Is this necessary? Is there a better way? Could we streamline this?
Next slide, please.
All right. And now we're talking about client and project strategies. So for me personally, when I think about sustainability, a really important part of that conversation is the way that sustainability extends beyond simply the environmental impact, but also upon like how it's how it impacts the individuals who are involved in the process. So as this quote says, during the design and development process, there are often choices that are made about who is allowed to participate, how that happens. And these are all acts that have a political charge to them. So I guess the question here is, how do you take that into account? And how do you make sure that you aren't ignoring, ignoring the act of, you know, involving stakeholders or taking the cowardly way out? As Mike puts it?
Right, right. Yeah, I think we, you know, in our prep call for this yesterday, we had an interesting discussion about like, exactly, you know, figuring out what it is, the projects that you choose to work on, are going to actually promote. And a lot of our conversation revolved around saying no to bad money, and what the term bad money means it could mean different things for different people. But But overall, the general gist is, and I think both might be great Mightybytes, and Wholegrain Digital share this, that the ethos that we want our projects to, to kind of put out there in the world is using business for as a force for good making sure that, you know, people are, you know, included, and, you know, strategies for Justice, and Equity and Diversity and Inclusion are included in the work that we do and stuff. And so, you know, I think we're not alone, either. I think many of the people obviously on this call are share that same kind of idea. So next, next slide, Nicole.
These are some of the strategies that we put together for a client and project ethos for sustainablewebdesign. org, the idea of incorporating, as I said earlier, Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and making sure that we're including diverse stakeholders in our projects, its diverse stakeholders makes for better projects, that's just a fact. And then, you know, promoting good health and wellness. So for us, that means work life balance, you know, making sure that that that, you know, the actual execution of the project, you know, helps helps keep stress levels at a minimum, these, like, a lot of the a lot of us who are in digital agencies work on big long projects that take many, many months. And that can be very stressful over over time, and stuff. So figuring out how to build, you know, regular check ins to make sure that we're paying attention to our health and wellness, as we go through the projects, as well as making sure that the project itself is is also promoting those things. So I mean, at Mightybytes, we don't, you know, we wouldn't do a project for a tobacco company, for instance. And, you know, that's, that's the kind of, kind of clients we look for are aligned with what the values that we hold hold as a company, promoting equity, equitable wealth distribution, I think that's really about like paying, paying a living wage, and just making sure that the project that you're working on is is, is also, you know, putting that I think, you know, we we're in that place right now, with the gig economy where income inequality is becoming a bigger and bigger issue in our industry, especially. And so figuring out, you know, how do you actually make make decisions around two projects that you're working on, so that equitable wealth distribution is part of the mix as well. And then finally, just, you know, having a project that supports more sustainable behavior, so you know, that works down to the page level where, you know, maybe you're offering more sustainable shipping options, but then when it goes all the way up to the client and project level, where, you know, you're just making sure that like, the projects that you're working on, are, are supporting, you know, more sustainable behaviors. It's, I want to say that all of this said, it's not always possible. And we acknowledge that and I acknowledge that. I don't know if you have anything you want to add to this, Tom. I know, we went back and forth on this a little bit. But
yeah, I mean, I think firstly, is important to say that this is one of the most highly subjective areas of late sustainable design and, and, and I think there is, there is no like, you know, kind of black and white, perfect way of doing things. But I think what's really important is, like project teams, form their own vision of what they think is the right way to run a project and that they kind of hold that in their minds, right from that foundation of a project. And, and the onboarding of a client even through theatres conclusion, but but also in terms of sustainable behaviors as the kind of day to day workflow of like, you know, do we need? Do we need to kind of have physical meetings, if that's going to be like, we're not local, and we have to travel a long way possibly even fly for a meeting for a web project? Is that is that required? Or could we run our projects in different ways that are inherently more sustainable?
Right? And no time? Has that been more evident in the past year? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Next slide, please.
All right. So content marketing, and content and marketing strategies. So this is a really important one, to me personally, "don't put something out there unless it matters to you and your audience. If you publish something useless, you're not only wasting time for yourself and your visitors, but you're also adding to the weight of your website and the web itself..." So this quote is all about intentionality, in terms of the content that's produced and posted and making sure that things that you put out into the world have some sort of purpose. And I was wondering, a bit about like, how do you assess what is useful to an audience? Or how do you make sure that what is the process of deciding like, what is important enough? Or what is useful enough to publish? I guess, because there's a lot of incentive I feel, to publish things that aren't kind of important or just kind of generate clicks. And there is a difference between those two things. Right?
Tom, this was yours.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, it sort of comes back to this principle of, of minimalism. And I think Gerry McGovern talks in his book, World Wide Waste a lot about the huge amount of, of just waste that there is on the Internet of content that's being stored and that people are loading. That's really not adding great value to people, you know, maybe it's even, okay, content, but it's just like, duplicate there's like 1000s of other articles that basically say the same thing. And it's just there to try and kind of attract some clicks, as Nicole said, and, and so I think, in content planning is really important to start with looking at who are the actual stakeholders of a particular web service? And what is genuinely useful to them? And actually do that research into? How can we give them the stuff that's useful to them in the most concise way possible, because there is not really streamlined and concise, then you're, you're making it more difficult for them, you're wasting their time. And so focusing really in on like real human needs, is a good lens to actually streamline content and strip out things that, that it's actually getting in people's way. And testing, you know, if you're not sure, like, you know, that's what analytics is, the one good use of analytics to find out is, is this content useful for people and or is it a dead end that people like, you know, coming into a piece of content and then bouncing straight out? Because it's not really identifying those pain points.
Nicole, do want to go to the next next slide. Yeah. So I love that quote from Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media Studios, which is right up the street from Mightybytes. They are also a B Corp. Andy, and I've had conversations about this whole idea of creating content that's useful for your target audience for years now. And I think, you know, we all get it in theory. And, you know, the reality is in practice, especially, you know, if you're working, perhaps with clients who just, you know, want to throw everything out there, and they want all the things to be on the website, we have had many clients like that in the past, and how do you have those conversations to help them understand, like, Look, we're working to create content that is truly useful for your target users. And I think that's a, it's not an easy, it's an easy sentence to write, it's not an easy thing to do in practice, I think, I think, you know, part and parcel with that is also making content accessible and easy to find, you know, making sure that users with disabilities can can can access the content, making sure that you know, anybody who, who, you know, you're kind of following SEO best practices and making sure that you know, in addition to focusing first on humans and the humans that are going to read it, that you're also optimizing the content in a way that is efficient, and also helps, you know, people with screen readers and assistive technologies, you know, absorb it and understand it. And then also, you know, making it easy easily by following web standards and SEO practices for you know, search engines to find it and serve it up in search engine pages.
And I think the last point of this thing is, you know, you really brought up the point of considering content's end of life. I know, we're not very good at like, you know, we regularly audit our content, but we don't necessarily plan for like, when is this post? Or when is this section of content going to be no longer useful? You know, like, I think, you know, it's we can put expiration dates on it and stuff like that. But I think that, you know, it's easy to focus on what's here. And now and looking forward, as opposed to kind of going back and being like, oh, that blog post that I wrote last year about topic x sucked and nobody, nobody, nobody read it, and nobody and so we should figure out what to do about that. Do it with do with, you know?
Yeah, I think, you know, content strategies, nearly always content creation strategies, there's very rarely discussion around like, you know, how long is this going to stay online? Should we update it, and six months time, a year's time, you know, whatever it is, it's just you create it, it's, you create it, you set it live, and you forget about it. But there are real benefits to streamlining that content, not just in terms of an easier user experience, because there's less clutter, but also there can be kind of better commercial results, we've got a client who is really on top of their content strategy, and a kind of long term sense. And they, they keep coming back to it. And they find that the posts, they regularly update, you know, every few months, because of the topics they're talking about quite.... you know that they evolve over time. So rather than constantly writing new articles that are kind of an evolution of the same thing, they keep going back and actually just updating the original articles on these kind of evergreen topics. And they find that those are consistently the ones that bring in the most traffic and the most revenue for them as a client. So I think there's real value in valuing old content as much as creating new content. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, there's for sure, we've taken a approach to our own blog with that similar to that, over the past few years of just making sure that you know, things that are that are, have been out there for several years, are they still useful? Are they still, you know, the things that we want to do they need to be updated? So then let's, you know, put the effort into making sure that the information is as useful as possible. Yeah. Oh, next slide, please.
All right. We're at developmental strategies now. So as web applications continue to grow in their scope, and ambition and functionality, so too, does the amount of data that is needed to that needs to be downloaded by each application. And that continues to increase at a steady pace. So as this continues, so too, does the does the amount of data? Yeah. But also does our request to fully optimize our delivery of that have great performance? And that is a complicated technical and hard to reach conclusion. I guess how do you properly optimize all of this data that needs to be downloaded?
Yeah, yeah, that's it. I mean, that's an ongoing moving target the strategies for, you know, everything from minifying scripts to to, you know, optimizing images, as I mentioned earlier, it's, you know, a constant thing, and it's a lot I mean, it there's a there's a lot there, you know, I think one of the things that could be useful, and that I think we personally, as a company, need to do a little bit better at is creating page weight budgets. I love the idea of those. And, you know, but we haven't had, we haven't been as good as I think we can be as a company in using those, and then also helping clients kind of understand their benefits.
I don't know, I'm gonna just do you want to just quickly, for anybody who's not familiar with the concept, just introduce what a page weight budget is.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So, so a page weight budget is basically setting there's performance calculator that you can use, that's what we've been using. And you can go in and I can I don't have the link to it handy, but I'm sure someone on here can actually, I think if you just Google performance calculator.
It might be performancebudget.io Yes.
Correct. Yeah, that's it. So you know, just setting kind of a target ceiling for the the data that you're using on each page. And then understanding you know, and that comes with understanding who your users are, and and making sure that you're optimizing for the widest possible, you know, low bandwidth users, widest number of devices and platforms and just making sure that you know, the data rate that you're you're doing is as optimized as possible and as minified as possible, and so setting a per page data ceiling, and then using the performancebudget.io To see where how good you're actually applying to that. I don't know, Tom, if you've had other kind of use cases for for doing that.
And, yeah, I mean, the page weight budget absolutely is a kind of a key a key strategy for us, I think. And I should just say the performance budget to Antonio just posted the link in the chat for anybody who's interested in looking at that.
Thank you, Antonio.
But I think just in general, like what this quote kind of sums up is, is this classic issue in computing of feature creep, you know, and it's always been the issue since like the first computer I have had, which is a few years down the line, this super fast machine that you have suddenly seems to be going at a snail's pace and, and you can't, you can't buy any new software that will actually work on it. And, and we've kind of got the same issue on the web, where the faster the internet gets, the more powerful not just based on the processing, but you know, the phones and, and computers that we're using, as end users are using, the more powerful everything gets, and the faster it gets, the more we can use that potential. So we add in more bloated code, we add in more features, we use larger files.
And, and so although you know, yeah, the internet's go faster in terms of like user experience, perception, perceived speed, but actually, behind the scenes, it's nowhere near as fast as it could be. Because we're always kind of eating in to the foundation of the new technologies giving us and you look back at a website from like, you know, the early 2000s, most of them would be more efficient, and in some cases more accessible, then make a really well optimized website now, just because we're layering in so much more in terms of design and technology. And, and, and partly, we get away with it, because it's easy, the internet's fast, and we know it's gonna be even faster tomorrow. So just throw things in. But actually, I think a really considered approach again, it's about attention to detail and thinking, how can we strip things back is really necessary. We need to we need to really optimize performance at every level.
Absolutely. You want to go to the next slide, Nicole, I'm gonna put a link in the chat to a blog post Mightybytes, wrote a while back, when GDPR came out the data privacy legislation in the EU. A developer did a test of removing all the user tracking and added scripts from USA Today, a popular newspaper here in the US and found out that 90% of the actual data was in those scripts, and that they basically pulled the page I don't exactly Oh, is 5.2 megabyte page down to 500k. And that's just by removing ad tracking and tracking user behavior and stuff like that. And so you know, that in that list, we have, you know, optimize performance of all assets that we just talked about, but making sure that, you know, you're not tracking things unnecessarily and prioritizing privacy and security goes a long way in helping, you know, make make these these solutions, you know, more sustainable, lean and mean, stuff that goes for following, you know, kind of web standards and making sure we at Mightybytes and Wholegrain. I'm sure it shares this is using open source tools and modular frameworks for the work that we do. And I know our devs try to write reusable code whenever possible. Anything else you want to add on this topic, Tom?
I think is I mean, we can we can spend a long time here.
Yeah. And then there's like Google, and all kinds of folks that have written about this for years and years and years. There's, there's so much content around this.
Optimize, optimize, optimize.
Yeah, totally. So with that in mind, let's go to the next screen.
All right, hosting strategies. So hosting is something that most people like particularly users, but also I guess, the producers of digital products don't often think about, but it's a huge deal to really think about, like, you know, how do we host our websites? Who is hosting them? How is how are these centers being powered? And one of the things that I guess is really difficult about it is like, you don't know necessarily, I don't think that that's one of the things that a lot of places uses to market their services or don't like, offer while you're doing research. So how do you kind of track down this information or how should we think about hosting our digital products more responsibly?
Go ahead, Tom.
Yeah, so I mean, definitely, this is a, this is a huge issue in terms of, I like the way Gary Cook put this that, you know, the internet is the single biggest thing that will ever we're gonna build. And it's all powered by electricity. So if we can, we can, as an industry prior, prioritize renewable energy that will help shift the whole energy grid. But if we don't, then we're actually kind of jeopardizing the whole kind of societal shift towards renewables. And, and so an easy way that we can do that without actually being like a data center provider, which most of us are not, is to use something like the Greenware Foundation database, which lists providers that have made a commitment to using renewable energy. And, and you can also kind of, you know, check, check websites, and IP addresses using their API tool. But also, in our experience, one of the best ways is to just kind of find the providers that you think meet your technical requirements. And then, and then ask them the question, you know, ask them to see their sustainability policies and make commitments to renewable energy in writing. And, and you'll generally get, like one of a few responses, you need to get no response, you'll need to...
And then you know.
And then, you know, basically, they've not really thought about this, and they don't, they don't want to talk about it. Or you'll get a really great response, which they may not publicize on their website, in which case, I always go back and say, hey, this should be like front and center and your website, or you get something kind of in between where they'll say, Yeah, actually, like, this is stuff we care about, and it's stuff we're working towards. But, you know, we're not all the way there. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's great to hear. And it's good to have that transparency.
Yeah, absolutely, we found, we went through probably every green green web post around it, when we were starting around this in the 10 2011 2013. We, you know, got test accounts with all of them, and really had challenges with a lot of them. And, and found that that. And, you know, again, this was 7, 8, 9 years ago, but what what they, we were, you know, completely impressed by commitment to renewable energy with some of them, but we they didn't have the customer service, or the uptime, or the security and reliability that we needed. And so, you know, there's a whole bunch of things to consider here in the mix. And, you know, I love that they, you know, committed to renewable energy, but if you, if I can't get ahold of anybody when I need them, you know, then then, you know, for the sustainable web Manifesto, that's not a resilient service. You know, it's not really and so, you know, we went all over the place to find, you know, a good web hosting partner. And and, yeah, it was, it was a long, long journey.
for sure. Yeah.
Nicole, will you effect can you go one slide forward? So, um, you know, I want to preface this by the fact that I'm certainly not a hosting expert. And and, you know, no, there's not not enough about you know, Chris Adams, who is on here is probably knows way more than both Tom and I combined. He's on this topic, for sure. But, you know, I'm happy to share with what, you know, what we what we the knowledge that we do have. Point one is for us, as it has always been the top one, which is why I put it in the list here. And then, you know, we're a LAMP stack firm. And so Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP are the tools of choice that we use when when working on things. Tom, do you want to add anything to this? I mean, there's, this is, like you said, like, like performance optimization, in development, this is one of those rabbit holes that you could go down to and get really tweaky for a really long time.
So yeah, you can I mean, one thing I definitely say is on the hosting side, in addition to like, the renewable energy kind of commitment, like the, the, the actual efficiency of the technology itself, is massively important. And, and especially, you know, in overcoming some inefficiencies in, in the kind of the code that we're using, so for example, you know, WordPress is an amazing tool, but it's not inherently efficient, in in a way that works behind the scenes. But if you've got a really well optimized hosting service that's doing, you know, pretty heavy caching so that there's minimal server load for every visitor that's taking a lot of load off the servers and saving a lot of energy in the process. So it can be good and well designed hosting service can actually really kind of minimize the energy demand.
Sure, yeah. Yeah. Let's move on to the next one. Next slide. All right. Otherwise, like I said, we could spend, we only have an hour here. And we want to get to Q&A for sure.
Yeah, we have some good questions in the chat. So I'd love to get to Q&A, but for business operations. So there is this observable fact that we have, that companies that focus on sustainability, or have missions that are socially and environmentally minded, have better have better outcomes. They're more effective. They're, they have better financial performance, they're more resilient. And I guess the question there is, why? Why does it? Why does doing good lead to doing? Well? If either of you have an answer to that question? Yeah.
I think both Tom and I could, again, talk for an hour or two about this. I mean, you know, we, Mightybytes has been a B Corp since 2011. And, you know, having integrating purpose in profit, and having a social and environmental mission at the core of the business, and our business model has been incredibly important for us, it's really is how we kind of define who we are as a business and what we stand for and stuff, it's where we put the line in the sand. In terms of things that we do and don't do, I know that there are a bunch of B Corp fans in the, in this workshop, or webinar. So I really appreciate that. I wouldn't run my business any other way. I just, I just know that that, you know, the B impact assessment, which is the tool that we use to kind of manage our impact is this really great design tool for helping you design a better business and and and create a roadmap for improving your impact over time, and, and it also just kind of gives you guardrails to say, this is the stuff that we stand for as a business. And these are the things that we don't and so, you know, we're about to undergo our fifth B Corp certification. And I actually, it's an arduous process. It's a lot, it takes a lot of time. But I actually look forward to it too, because it's a chance for me to take a step back and look at all the moving parts of my business and say, Alright, what were the areas that I can improve? What can we do better at what what what is maybe not necessarily working? That kind of thing. So I personally think that business operations strategies for digital agencies, especially are core to this whole idea of sustainable web design. Tom, would you have anything to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with everything you just said. And in response to what Nicole said about, you know, why, why the businesses that prioritize sustainability and sort of social purpose, tend to perform better financially. And, and I think a big part of it is, I think a big part of it is that word, purpose that when, when there's a clear purpose within an organization, that that intrinsically motivates people in a way that kind of just just go into work, because that's my job doesn't, doesn't do. And when you have not just not just leaders, but they entire teams and companies, people who are aligned with trying to create some real positive impact in the world, it's a reason to get out of bed in the morning and try to do not just an okay job, but try to do like, the best you can possibly do, and deliver, like, really, really great products and services. And I think that kind of aspect of intrinsic motivation is a is a key factor in why they want to perform well. And then they also attract really talented people, because because those talented people want to do something meaningful with their skills in the time.
Totally. Yeah. Next slide. Nicole, please. Thanks. So I mentioned this earlier, and tracking, verify impact using the B impact assessment or similar there's other tools, the B impact assessment is not the only one out there. But you know, personally as B corpse. That's what we use, you know, committed to improving economic benefits for stakeholders. I mean, that's really just making sure that, you know, the financial solvency that your company has, is also helping any of your company stakeholders, incorporating Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion policies into your operations, and your governance and everything about your business. And then, of course, divesting from fossil fuels whenever and wherever possible. We've been the past year, we've been on a net zero journey. And so we we actually just got to a place where we can offer carbon negative website hosting and such with our clients. And so that's that's, that's been a driver for us for this is just, you know, how do we make sure that our organization eventually completely divest from fossil fuels in all of its its operations and business? Anything you want to add to that, Tom?
I think I think just to say that, like, you know, the reason that we've included this here is because as as people who work in digital projects. It's not just the projects themselves, like we all work within organizations, and those organizations have a an impact in their own way on society on the planet. And, and we all play a part in trying to make that as positive as possible.
Yeah, I agree. So I know the next next slide, please, that I know that there were some questions about like, recommendations for, you know, kind of some of these strategies. For each one of these things in these bullets that we that we mentioned today, we sustainablewedesign.org is where we is where we Wholegrain and Mightybytes have been collaborating for the past few months on a revamp of sustainable web design.org. And all of these strategies are included in there. And then under each strategy, there is at least one if not several links to out to posts about you know, that topic, and it's a 1.0 release, we just launched it on Monday, there's still a lot of things like we want to add a dark mode, we have some accessibility controls, we want to add to it. I mean, there's definitely some more things that we're we're going to be working on edit. But for now, in the preparation for this webinar, we wanted to get a base level or baseline of strategies out there that anybody on this web website can or were on this webinar can use in reference and stuff. And, you know, if you have strategies that absolutely think you need to be that need to be included, hit that contact button on there, and feel free to send them to us and we'll be continuing to add to this and making it a better resource. Absolutely, this is going to evolve over time. So we really want people to fit into this and make it a resource that everybody can benefit from. Yeah, and I think to that next slide, one of the main reasons is that someone we know has a book coming out on this topic, matter of a couple of weeks. And so we wanted to make sure that the the site represented the book. And so Tom, tell us about your new book.
Yeah, sure. So I don't know if people can see me on camera with some slides. But
Whoo!
I got, I got a fast copy of my new book, sustainable web design in the post today. Which, which is really exciting, because I haven't seen the actual book since it was in its previous incarnation as a Word document. So that's, that's super exciting. And one of the things that one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I really want to put sustainability on the agenda of the web industry as like a serious topic that should be like, included at the core of like, all projects. And, you know, like, we consider accessibility like an important topic in our industry, we can set up security and privacy important topics in our industry, we should be looking at sustainability in the same way. And that's, that was really my motivation for writing the book is to be one, just one more small drop in the ocean to like helping nudge, nudge things along in that direction. If you blinked to the next slide, Nicole, I'll just give you a very quick overview.
I'm not gonna bore you by reading the whole book for the next 12 hours. Once inside the burn, the burn very much focuses on the environmental side of sustainable web design. So here in this webinar, we've been talking about people on planet and the book does talk about kind of the human side as well, but the core focus is very much how do we minimize our environmental impact? So it goes through like the what and the why, why should we care about this topic? What is it? And? And? And how is it? How is it relevant to our day to day work as people who work in digital, there's then a chapter about like quantifying, or an impact and benchmarking and trying to get a sense of like scale and being able to like judge success, have we actually managing to make tangible improvements. There's then a chapter on design, which includes real examples of like, techniques that you can actually do in your, in your design process to make things more efficient while also improving user experience and accessibility, which I think is really key. Similarly, for development, so really samples, it's not a coding book, this book is like written in a way that should hopefully be understandable to anybody who works on digital projects, whether you're a project manager or a marketing manager or designer developer. So it's not you don't have like code and the development chapter. But you will find like principles and examples that you can, you can follow and you can try to embed into our projects. Similarly hosting we do a bit of a deep dive into like the kind of the nuances of what is like green hosting really mean and open up a can of worms and get into it a little bit but you know, kind of accessible way and tries to provide some practical advice on the things to look for when choosing a hosting, hosting service. And then questions like Commonly comes up when people come and ask me like, how do you actually sell sustainable sustainability in the digital world, get buy in from your clients get buy in from your managers get buy in from your colleagues. So there's a chapter really talking about that, and, you know, draws on some of the experience that we've had at Wholegrain also that Tim has had in his agency at Mightybytes over the years, shed some light on how to go about that. And then finally, just a job to really reflecting on kind of the resilience of the web itself, and changing climate, and how we can do all these things to try and make digital have a less of a negative impact, but hopefully even a positive impact on the environment. But we should also reflect on how the climate is changing. And that changes the weather itself in terms of the human needs of life situations, people might find itself in response to natural disasters, but also the physical infrastructure of the Internet, and how that can be affected by rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and so on. And how we need to be thinking ahead and making our services as resilient as possible to, to kind of get ahead of that.
Awesome. Well, kudos to you, Tom. That's awesome. We're really, really happy for you.
Thank you. So it will be you can pre order now.
I put the link in, I put the link in the in the chat to pre-order. It'll be out in two weeks. So the last thing we're going to cover, and I'm going to go through this quickly, I will put links to all the things that I'm going to talk about we're going to talk about in the chat. But I want to make sure we have time for Q&A. And we're already 10 minutes up on the hour. So I'm quickly whizzing through these slides, we're going to talk about just kind of different resources.
So Gerry McGovern's book World Wide Waste, my book Designing for Sustainability, Cross-Cultural design from A Book Apart, the same publisher that is publishing Sustainable Web Design. Next slide.
Wholegrain is put together websitecarbon.com for actually tracking emissions of webpages. In 2013, Mightybytes launched Ecograder, which is, I would say the precursor to that. And we know it's on the list for us to over overhaul it and give it a revamp this year, we were trying to get Sustainable Web Design out the door. And that's kind of next in our sights. So next slide. Tom, you wanna talk second for a second about Curiously Green?
Yeah, just to say that we've got a monthly newsletter, where we talk about things that are going on in this world of greening the web and you can you can subscribe to that in the footer of the open digital website, or in the footer of the website, COVID. website, and I and I am, I invite you to suggest what you want to see in there and send over ideas and stuff. Right.
Next slide, please. So climateaction.tech, climatedesigners.org are two great resources. And I'm just going to kind of leave that as is. And again, I'll put the URLs for these in the chat for people want to click directly. Next slide.
And then yesterday, I heard from James at sustainable UX that they are going to have an upcoming event in q3 of 2021. So sustainableux.com has been doing this topic covering this topic since 2015, or 16, I think. And it's been typically a free annual online content conference via YouTube Live, and such. So there's a whole bunch of resources there to push further beyond this. But I want to make sure that we can go to the next slide we can get into to Q&A, because we are running short on time. I know that was fast, I whizzed through that.
All right. Okay, so we have a few questions in the chat asking for some more resources or recommendations for implementing and maintaining some of these strategies. If you have any more specific questions, you can put them in the chat otherwise, I'm going to assume that those are answered by the last few slides. Also, this deck will be available afterwards. I know we went by that really fast went through that really fast. So if you missed any of the URLs, you'll have access to all of the resources here afterwards. For our first question that we had some technical questions about how to determine which how to determine which colors are the most resource intensive, and I just wanted to get those out of the way because the first few questions that came in. Do we have any specific strategies for that?
Yeah, sure. So Google did a study. It was based on that pixel phones with OLED screens and they, I mean, essentially, the simple answer is that the brighter the color, the more energy it uses because OLED screens are basically tiny light bulbs. So the whiter it is, the more energy is using. Black is basically switched off. But the only kind of nuance that they found was the glue some reason, out of all the colors that are not like blue was the most energy intensive, about 25% more energy intensive than the red and green pixels.
All right. Thank you for that answer. We have a question about how many people optimize their sites for Ecosia instead of or as well as Google.
Yeah, I saw that question earlier. Thank you for for it, Andrew. Um, you know, I, I'm under the impression and Tom, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he Ecosia uses Bing for search results.
It's Bing, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, honestly, for us, when we're when we're thinking about optimizing a site, it's for performance. And the search engine is latter, you know, obviously, we want to optimize for search engines in terms of crawlability. But that, you know, web standards take care of a lot of that accessibility takes care of a lot of that and just optimizing your content in a way that is, is useful. So I can't say personally, that we, you know, specifically look at ecosia. I use it as my default search engine in on my computer, but I can't say that we absolutely optimized sites for that. Our goal at mighty bytes at least, is to just follow search engine optimization, best practices. Tom, is there anything different that you're doing?
No, absolutely the same? Yeah.
All right. Veronica asks, How can you balance your business needs for advertising and tracking scripts with keeping your site light?
Yeah, you know, Tom, you answer that one?
Well, I think it comes down to this principle of really interrogating what what you're trying to achieve. So in terms of tracking, look at like, what is the data that you actually need? And why do you need it and, and once you know that, then look at what's the most efficient way labels are one of the most efficient tracking scripts, they could achieve that and even you know, a lot of tracking scripts have ways that they they have kind of minimal versions of them that you can, that you can use. But equally in terms of the advertising scripts, there was an interesting case study I saw last week of the it was the Dutch state broadcaster, I can't remember what they called, but how they removed personalized ads from their, from their website, and found that actually, they ended up generating more revenue from ads by building their own ad server, which we had non personalized data so that they can actually not have to worry about the GDPR implications. And I thought that was great, because there's this kind of assumption that a) like more data is always better and b) more personalization is always better. And I think it's interesting that as case studies coming out, where people have challenged that and found that they can actually get better results with less tracking and less personalization.
I would just add to that, maybe on a layer of get permission to, you know, I mean, like, whenever it's possible, is, you know, just adding the idea of opt-in, you know, to all those things.
Yeah. Connected with this topic, I think, is, is there something, for example, storytelling that can make this connection for potential clients? In terms of I think this is in terms of had like selling sustainability in a sense? Like, how do you make clients understand that like, this is an important thing that matters?
Tom, you have a chapter on that. I'm gonna also defer to you on that one.
I think the key thing, no matter who you're talking to, is to understand what they care about, understand who they are, and, and talk to them in their own language about the things that they care about. And the interesting thing about, like, the many sustainability strategies and digital projects is that they tend to have positive benefits in other areas, whether that's improved conversion rates, or like improved SEO, or improve user experience, or improved accessibility, or, or all combination of these things. And I think the finding out what people really care about, and then telling the story within that frame, is tends to be the thing that gets them interested rather than trying to make somebody who's not that interested in sustainability become interested in sustainability, right?
Yeah, no, when we first started, oh, sorry, I didn't know. Yeah, when we started first trying to sell this, we got a lot of kind of glazed-over looks in the early days and realized that we kind of needed to adjust our approach accordingly. And I think exactly what you just said is a really, really smart way to look at it for sure. We're coming up on time and I know there's a whole bunch of other questions on reusable design and headless CMS and and WordPress. And all that kind of stuff. First of all, thank you, everybody, for all of your questions, I'm sorry, we're not going to be able to get to all of them. But I, you know, I do want to actually close out with one, one thing that kind of, I think touches on, on a lot of these questions, we chose WordPress for sustainablewebdesign.org. And we had a long conversation about this upfront, because we thought we really wanted to do like a headless, you know, like a Jamstack type thing, and, and create a static site. What we realized with the time that we had, you know, was that we didn't, you know, a big learning curve, well, we're also trying to do our client work every day was going to be a real struggle for us in the amount of time, we wanted to get sustainable web design.org out. By the time that the the book came out, we knew that there was going to be a 1.0 release in that there's going to be, you know, we're going to be adding to that and improving it over time. And so, you know, I think these questions around like, you know, which, you know, whether you use a cert CMS, whether WordPress is that CMS, whether or not you use one of these headless approaches, really depends on a number of different factors. And for us when, when Wholegrain and Mightybytes were sitting down and trying to figure out, you know, what's the best way for us to approach this, we ultimately landed in an area where we pushed our comfort zone a little bit, but we didn't go too far afield from it. And I don't know if you want to add anything to that to that, Tom. But I think it's an important point to bring up or in regards
I think, I think there's a lot of benefits to like, you know, Jamstack as a technology for, for efficiency of like technical efficiency and energy efficiency. But I think there's also, you can do a huge amount of optimized platforms like WordPress, like I said earlier, we get them very, very close to the same level of efficiency. And what you're getting at the same time is either, like speed of development, if that's what your comfort zone is, and you're getting ease of maintaining content, which is equally important earlier. So you got to weigh up those benefits based on your own skills, your own knowledge and and what was going to work for you, but try to implement it in a efficient way.
Cool. Thanks. Next slide, Nicole.
I just wanted to close out with one quick thing. We are Mightybytes committed to doing these webinars monthly. And so our next one is going to be on corporate digital responsibility and kind of exploring frameworks for helping organizations rethink about how digital products and services integrate with their business practices in a responsible way. So I put a link in the chat to RSVP for our next one, which is going to be at the end of February. Thank you all everybody, for attending. And for all the amazing, great questions. And yeah, we really appreciate it. Thank you, Tom, and Nicole, for going through all of putting through all of this together and going through it back and forth and such. It's been really a good experience.
Yeah, thank you so much to all of you who attended.
And we will, we will set up send a thank you out with a link to the slide deck, recording of the of the session, and any other resources that were that were shared here. So that you'll have all of those in your inbox. Thanks very much. Alright. Bye.
