Going Green Online Isn’t Just About Saving Energy
Sure, you can save carbon if you use less power in your web server. It’s easy to imagine how making one website more efficient could mean a better experience for the site’s visitors. Pages download faster, browsers display the page faster and less data means less money spent on hard drives. Doing this on many websites can have large impact. Optimizing billions of websites and trillions of webpages is surely an important goal.
The cost reduction at the data center level is driving innovation in software and hardware development. Today we’ve got better software processing code faster on the more efficient hardware. At Green Collar technologies, we’re even working on a plan to bring Green Web Serving to Hawaii. This would run the web server with power from the sun over at the Natural Energy Lab in Kona. Look for more on this later.
One of the critical success factors of the Internet has been it’s ability to improve our lives. that’s the big picture. The details are where the potential for big impact exists. Please allow me a moment to explain.
“Time on site” is the single most important key metric according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It’s a metric that purports how interesting someone finds your site or the information on your site. Most of your website visitors stay about 5 seconds and leave. This wasted traffic can be measured but the most helpful equation is way more complex than that.
For example, if my site is truly efficient, I can help the visitor find exactly what they want in a shorter amount of time. It doesn’t mean that it was any less helpful, just more efficient. If the resources on our site are valuable and easy to use and remove, how can this be measured? If writers and other bloggers come to your site to grab content like embed code for videos and other links and quickly go back to their sites, does it mean your site is any less important? The answer to this loaded question is yes. At least to advertisers. However, if this is the case, your site is very efficient. Not only are your saving time and money for others, you’re also providing that value quickly and with much less carbon. In fact, the more people that visit your site, the more you help the environment. Carbon calculators do not account for this value.
So does all this get sorted out? The answer is in spending more time in the details. Spending more time analyzing the details is out of the question for small website owners. Online marketers specialize in this area and get paid well to do so.
However, there are a few things website owners can do:
>> Provide the right information, at the right time in the right format to your visitors. If they find your site from a keyword or keyphrase search, then provide the relevant information on the landing page. Don’t make them hunt for the content.
>> Give your visitors options when it comes to file formats. Not all information in your web pages should be stuck in the html in your page or post. Good interaction design addresses this challenge. For example, sometimes your visitors need quality printing. Sometimes cutting and pasting from your site to another is the most important consideration. Consider offering an Adobe Acrobat PDF or a Google Document. Consider offering a branded source file under a Creative Commons license. Also consider the importance of rich media on your site. Rich media is the most effective way to increase your “time on site” metric.
>> Learn more about sustainable web platforms and designs.
>> No time for a site? No problem. All of the content on most websites can be communicated in ten minutes using video. You may not even need a website. Have you considered releasing your marketing message strictly on social networks such as MySpace, Linkedin, Facebook and YouTube? For the first time ever, it’s a viable alternative to having your own website.
