A green website design company?

As part of our KTP project at Picseli, we are looking at streamlining our process so we can save time and money... and then pass these savings onto our customers. A part of this has included looking at the environmental or green issues associated with web design. But do customers actually seek out green companies? Is it a consideration when choosing a supplier?

According to CO2Stats.com: "People want websites they visit to be eco-friendly." So surely businesses should want eco-friendly websites and therefore look for a green web company. However, out of all of the customers I have met not one has asked about our environmental policy or how green our websites are. This has made me wonder though - what IS a green website?

What is a Green Website?
From my research a green website is one that either promotes environmentally friendly ideas or products, or that uses eco-friendly technologies or methods to reduce the site's carbon footprint. There is even talk of a new domain extension .eco (See article on Business Strata) for websites that are green.

Ways to make your website green include:

• Print friendly pages - when someone prints out a page from your website, make sure they don't use excessive amounts of paper and ink. A style sheet for printers will ensure that only the useful information is printed.
• Be Green Certified - CO2Stats.com helps to make your website carbon neutral.
• Have a quick to download website - makes sure that visitors aren't wasting power waiting for a slow website to download.
• Keep consistent navigation - reduces wasted energy while visitors browse through your website trying to find information.

How we try to be a green web design company
While Picseli has only been going for 5 months, BSS has been around for 25 years and has a number of policies in place to become environmentally friendly. BSS are currently aiming to be recognised under the Green Dragon Standard. Our policies include:

• Recycling paper & plastics.
• Recycling or resuing all computer equipment & hardware.
• Returning used ink cartridges and toners.
• Reducing the amount we print & ensuring both sides of paper are used.
• Using scrap paper for notes and scribbling.
• Ensuring all non essential equipment is turned off at the end of the day or when not in use.
• When possible we use emails & phone calls to cut down on unnecessary travel.
• And we focus on digital documentation to reduce paper wastage.

These is still plenty more we can do that will enable us to become eco-friendly, and we currently have a KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) project in place that will be looking at our impact on the environment and how we can reduce our carbon footprint.

Search Engine Update

Due to the lack of blog posting and changes to the website, I was interested to see what effect this would have on our website search engine rankings... so here you are:

web site design swansea from position 51 to 14
website design swansea from 20 to 5 - PAGE 1!
web design swansea from 17 to 16
swansea web design from 37 to 30
web designer swansea from 19 to 16
web development swansea from 13 to 4 - PAGE 1!

So, as long as you have content that is targeted and relevant, and that the site is updated sometimes, you will do well in the search engines.

I am confident that the process could be sped up, but am none-the-less pleased with the results. To prove it is working (because there is no point being on page 1 of Google for phrases no one searched for!) we have had clients who have found us on Google give us a call.

To help improve your search engine rankings give us a call on 01792 222302 to find out how to best improve your website.

The plumbers tap...

Like the plumber's tap that always drips, the web developers website doesn't get updated. The good news, I suppose, is that we have been busy and finding the time to suitably research a good blog post has not been available, so we decided that instead of writing useless posts we would wait until we had something useful to say. The problem with that however, is getting back into it.

No apologies
So, this is me getting back into blogging, with a promise to dedicate more time to it. I read on a blog somewhere (apologies if it's yours!) that bloggers shouldn't apologise for a lack of posting, so I won't.

What we've been up to
Here's a quick update on what we've been working on. Phase 1 of Vibe TV is live and our developers are working hard to add some super advanced functionality to the content management system. The new Swansea Business Club website is being built using Wordpress and will be live on March 27. The Llys Nini Aninal Centre's website is in development. iStar Showreel is also being developed in DotNetNuke. Some new designs are being done, but I can't say much about them yet and we've sent lots of proposals out - so fingers crossed!