How To Be An Even Greener Web Designer

For my latest article in Desktop magazine, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Burrell, a super nice guy who is co-founder of xert (a small web design team) and co-creator of geofeat, a green business directory.

Roger was full of useful advice on how to reduce one’s carbon footprint on the world. Ever since our chat, I’ve been making headway in my own life. I’m not quite there yet (am on the waiting list for the local food co-op, and find it difficult to justify replacing our hot water system with solar until it actually stops working and we have good reason to).

The article is available online in its entirety, but here’s the essential parts of Roger’s advice, compressed into 15 tips. Some of it is obvious, whilst other tips you may not have considered. The title of this article is a reference to my previous article, which generated quite a bit of discussion on SitePoint.

1. Insulate your home (sounds obvious, but an alarming number of homes are still not insulated)
2. Install solar hot water (it pays for itself, and there are rebates)
3. Shop at local markets (reduces transport cost of the food)
4. Eat seasonal fruit and vegetables (lessens the chance that something is imported)
5. Engage with your community (swap lemons from your tree with eggs from the neighbour’s chickens)
6. Work from home (reduced transport costs)
7. Upgrade your computer or monitor (LCDs and laptops consume less power than CRTs and desktops)
8. Unplug unused appliances (they drain energy overnight)
9. Align your appointments (in order to reduce transport costs … makes sense from a time management perspective too)
10. Install LED lights (they consume even less power than fluorescent energy-saver bulbs)
11. Shred and mulch (shredded paper is great for the garden)
12. Use EcoFont for internal documents (it uses less printer ink than other fonts)
13. Choose a green printer (this can be difficult and requires you to do your research)
14. Use green web hosting (more web hosts are utilising solar energy, rather than just buying carbon offsets)
15. Inspire and educate your clients (yeah!)

Of course, when this green-themed issue of Desktop arrived in the post, it came bundled with a jumbled wad of paper advertising almost as thick as the magazine itself. Irony, anyone?

posted: 31.05. 2009, 00:13 (0)