Many times when an environmental subject is raised, we often direct our focus on carbon emissions and the way we use energy directly. But from my opinion, I think it is more complicated than that. From my professional perspective, being a pretty experienced software developer for some years. I came to realize that even our software and web application has a big impact in our environment and carbon foot prints.
This subject is very wide, so for the sake of your valuable time, I will go ahead and list down some things developers can do to make their websites somewhat Eco friendly.
Make your web content light weight.
When your website is heavy in content, means it will consume more bandwidth, longer delivery time, for serving a single user for a single page of content. You need to optimize all images and make them web friendly, small size but good quality, reduce the number of individual CSS files by “minifying” them, or using some tools that will merge several css files into one, and reduce the number of HTTP calls a website makes to serve a single page, this also applies to other libraries e.g jQuery libraries.
If your website has rich media content such as videos and audio, use the dedicated services for rich media delivery that are optimized for that purpose, such as YouTube, Vimeo just to name a few. Most of the time these services uses cutting edge technology to improve performance while utilizing less resources.
Improve your website/software usability
When your website is UX optimized, users will spend less time navigating and figuring where what content is, and spend more time reading and getting the benefit of your website. You can achieve this by organizing related content in a well managed and logical arrangement, put all the necessary information in one reachable place. Reduce or eliminate unnecessary animations, improve readability. Break long pages into small well organized pages, this will cut the time to load the whole page, in turn it will improve user experience regarding loading time.
Provide unique and quality content.
It is useless to provide duplicated content, this not only reduces the relevance of the web, but also uses resources unnecessarily. Give your users quality and unique content, if you feel your users will benefit from content given by other source, then provide a link to that source, this reduces unnecessary content duplication. and makes your website more relevant and useful. In fact this is the main idea of the WEB “linking content” It pays to do some searching before you write on something, chances are that somebody has already written exactly what you want to write about, and if this is the case, there is no need for you to rewrite same thing again. source it.
Use known technology standard.
Make the content of your website accessible from all major devices that can access the web, this gives your website a wide range of users who will be able to benefit from your content using devices they have. Use common video and audio formats, document types i.e. PDF. Unless it is very necessary or if your content has a special segment of users that need to use a unique technology for the given purpose of your service.
Case study. I did this small case study about how usability can improve efficiency and reduce carbon footprints. NOTE sample data was collected in a period of 3 months.
For poor navigation websites. It took an average of 5 seconds for users to find where to click, and it took an average of 4 clicks to find the content they ware looking for.
I used a Google web optimizer SPLIT TEST method for a website with an average of 50 visitors per day.(The calculation is based on users accessing the page and looking for a specific article page in a site.)
1 user 1 day 4 clicks 20 sec
50 users 1 day 200 clicks 4000 sec
50 users 1 month 6000 clicks 120,000 sec (33.3hrs)
50 users 1 year 73000 clicks 1460.000sec (405 hrs) = 16 Days!
While a well UX optimized site, user spends an average of 2 seconds to find what they want, and it took them about 2 clicks to find the content.
1 user 1 day 2 clicks 4 sec
50 users 1 day 100 clicks 400 sec
50 users 1month 3000 clicks 120,00 sec (3.3hrs)
50 users 1 year 36500 clicks 1460.00sec (40.5 hrs) = 2 Days!
Now from my simple calculations above, the poor designed website uses 16 days a year just processing unnecessary click for users to find the same content that the second website users only 2 days a year.
Think for yourself how much energy will be used to power the servers, air conditions, routers, pay the technicians, leave alone the energy used by users devices or computers for 16 Days? It is simply huge. And remember there are thousands and thousands with poor usability. So we are very busy polluting our planet just by poor designs of our websites.
So please do our planet a favor by optimizing your website, and this will give your users an added advantage and let them spend their precious time, reading your content instead of trying to find it.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6117578
About the author: I'm a professional software engineer, a system analyst and userbility expert. I do professional training on several IT related subjects also provide consultation. I am a founder of Qusaz intelligent solution company. I love to blog from time to time, whenever I find some interesting topic that might help others. Read more from this author