Our Sustainable Bytes events are becoming quite a thing! 

I hosted our second Sustainable Bytes event earlier in February, this time with the theme of ‘A Green Web’.

There was a great mixture of professionals and enthusiasts all eager to learn, share and get involved in this session topic. So we started with a few open questions to get everyone warmed up. Turns out there wasn’t much need, as the conversations flowed nicely throughout the session. 

Here’s a round-up.

The Early Days

We talked about some of the first e-commerce journeys and how they worked. A low-fi experience for customers, with little information on the screen and sometimes still using the phone to make payments for goods and services. Who can remember those days?

Over time businesses have become creative on how to gain your attention on the internet, and with the use of videos, pictures and colours that are designed to get customers’ attention, with no real sight or understanding of the impact, but as time has gone on the awareness of the impact is increasing all the time. 

It was very well articulated by one of the guests, Lisa Walker, who quite elegantly put, “We have been spoiled.” When it comes to the internet, things have got quicker, flashy and maybe overall a bit too convenient!

“We have been spoiled” Lisa Walker

A super resource mentioned was the Way Back Machine, where there is an archive of all the old versions of websites. You can go back in time and see how businesses have changed their digital presence over the years and even decades in some cases.

Energy Guzzlers

Energy consumption on our websites became a big discussion point;

• We talked about how videos and visuals have a great appeal to potential customers/users, but they are also energy-hungry. This is especially true as videos auto-play when a customer visits a web page or site. This increases the energy needed to show the web page, and also to play sound or visuals.
• Designing user journeys that meet the customer’s needs but also do so without unnecessary additional stages that keep customers online for longer than required
• Staying on the theme of user journeys, we talked about the experiences we get from companies that ask you to download their app, rather than continue using a browser version of their site. This raised the question in the room: how many apps do we have on our phones?!
• Bots- we learned that 47% of the traffic that’s whizzing around the internet is from bots and not people! That’s a lot of bots isn’t it, but it’s also using a lot of energy. There are ways to tackle this with WAF (web application firewalls).
• It’s not all doom and gloom when starting from scratch building a website. There are emerging frameworks for development teams to test – https://greensoftware.foundation/ 

Digital Wellbeing 

• How much time do we spend on our devices both phones, tablets, laptops and PCs? Thinking about this was a real cringe moment. I know personally I spend between 2-3 hours per day using my phone alone. Did you know most phones have a Digital Wellbeing setting, so you can monitor how much time you use your handset each day?

What are the Alternatives?

When thinking about the products and services we use, there are lots of alternatives that have a sustainable focus. From web browsers such as Ecosia- which plants trees based on the user, all the way through to more business-related tools such as

• An alternative to Eventbrite could be Ticket Tailor.
• Choosing a green hosting provider who sources their energy for their services in a sustainable way.
• Email marketing tools such as MailChimp have alternatives such as Ecosend.

Questions for Pondering

• If every business made small changes to their impact on the planet, we could see a longer-term and significant difference to our planet.
• If we built websites just filled with text, much like a book. Would this make the changes we need? Or should we be looking for websites to adopt more sustainable practices from the outset?
• Do you know the carbon footprint of your business currently? There are lots of online tools that can help

My Closing Thoughts

We started holding these events as an opportunity to bring together people who were not just experts in their field, but also enthusiasts. How often does a small business owner get to sit and discuss green hosting and web development without it turning into a sales pitch or feeling left out of the conversation? 

And that’s just one of the reasons why I do this. It brings together knowledge, enthusiasm, and a shared interest in something important.

Hearing so many positive comments about the day shows how valued these events are. I can say we’ll keep hosting them for as long as people find them useful.

Creating a safe environment for people to work, connect and much more is important to me and to the Optimo team. We have to share. Thank you for putting that round table on the other week it is so hard at the moment to find a decent group of people at these types of events. I can honestly say that I really enjoyed the company of everyone in that room. So massive thanks to you for creating that space much appreciated – Hannah Stacey

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