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.
- Insulate your home (sounds obvious, but an alarming number of homes are still not insulated)
- Install solar hot water (it pays for itself, and there are rebates)
- Shop at local markets (reduces transport cost of the food)
- Eat seasonal fruit and vegetables (lessens the chance that something is imported)
- Engage with your community (swap lemons from your tree with eggs from the neighbour’s chickens)
- Work from home (reduced transport costs)
- Upgrade your computer or monitor (LCDs and laptops consume less power than CRTs and desktops)
- Unplug unused appliances (they drain energy overnight)
- Align your appointments (in order to reduce transport costs … makes sense from a time management perspective too)
- Install LED lights (they consume even less power than fluorescent energy-saver bulbs)
- Shred and mulch (shredded paper is great for the garden)
- Use EcoFont for internal documents (it uses less printer ink than other fonts)
- Choose a green printer (this can be difficult and requires you to do your research)
- Use green web hosting (more web hosts are utilising solar energy, rather than just buying carbon offsets)
- 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?
Tags: design, environment, greenGearing Up For FullCodePress 2009
I’ve just finished packing my bags to fly to Sydney for tomorrow’s FullCodePress event, and it’s pretty exciting.
Australia takes on New Zealand in the build-a-website-in-a-day competition, as part of the CeBIT conference at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre (if you’re in Sydney, come along and watch—you can get in for free using the fcpcebit09 registration code).
I’m not involved in judging or anything this year, but will be one of the volunteers who is running around taking photos, writing blog posts, conducting video interviews with team members, sabotaging the Kiwi’s internet connection and generally wreaking havoc. I’m taking my sleeping bag, as we’ll be locked in the conference hall from 6pm tomorrow night (hopefully with pizza).
Yes folks, it’s about as geeky as it gets. Here’s the proof:
I have the responsibility tomorrow of carrying the official Champion’s Trophy on the plane and to the event. It’s a sizeable, diamond-shaped glass sculpture that has every chance of being confiscated by airport security for too closely resembling a weapon.
If for some reason I don’t make it to the event, you might be able to hear my cries from the deepest, darkest interrogation room at the airport … “Aussie Aussie Aussie!!!”
Tags: fcp09, fullcodepressWhat Every Print Designer Needs To Know About Building Web Sites
When Desktop‘s editor approached me a couple of months ago about writing the feature article for the May issue of Desktop magazine, I was a little apprehensive.
On the one hand, it’s an honour to be asked (I’ve been writing a column about web design for the magazine for over a year now, and they haven’t asked me to stop, so I guess I’ve been doing something right). On the other, I was pretty nervous — unlike the online world, reader feedback about a print article is few and far between, so I’ve never had any affirmation that my articles are written at the right level for that audience, other than the editor continuing to give me a new deadline each month.
Additionally, the scope for the topic was potentially huge — “Getting On The Web: What Works and What Doesn’t”. It was a topic that I felt comfortable writing on, so I figured I’d give it a shot, and began fleshing out the article well before my deadline. As it turned out, I had to ask for an extension to get it finished due to my wife having some unexpected emergency brain surgery, but I got it done in the end.
Getting on the web has never been easier for end users interested in publishing photos, chatting with friends and dumping random thoughts for the world to savour, but building a professional website is as difficult as it has always been.
The article was given the title “wwwdotme”, and an abbreviated version has been published at Desktop’s web site (although you can read a full version on SitePoint). Hopefully it will be some food for thought for print designers who dabble in the web without realising just what is involved.
Matthew Magain works as the manager for online media at