Scottish Enterprise Design blog
Transforming public services to businesses in Scotland
I had an interesting conversation today with a couple of colleagues from VisitScotland. They had come across our web estate carbon calculator, and were interested in replicating our approach.
I had already indicated in the response to the invitation that I had reservations about how useful this approach is. So it was an interesting chat.
Continue reading “On calculating carbon”All online activity generates carbon emissions. Every image downloaded, every click, server call and visit to our site. These types of interactions generate Scope 3 emissions. Lowering these emissions helps Scottish Enterprise towards achieving our Net Zero targets. And, for our users, the user experience is improved, along with SEO, because pages load faster and they use less data interacting with our sites.
In the run-up to January 2023 we migrated our first site – SDI.co.uk – to our new Design System.
Just under 3 years of research, design, build and, finally, the migration of content from the old site to the new site. This is a huge milestone in the development and success of our future websites for Scottish Enterprise.
Continue reading “Migrating our first site to the Scottish Enterprise Design System”
The carbon costs of “digital” are not well understood.
How many emails have you received with “Consider the environment before printing this email” in the signature?
How many have you received with “Consider the environment before hitting Reply All to 26 random people” and adding “Thanks”?
For many people, “virtual” means “not real”.
As in, almost literally, non-existent.
Terms like “cloud” don’t help.
The reality is, the internet is the biggest machine humanity has ever built. It circles the entire planet.
Continue reading “Measuring our carbon output”Last week I read a Twitter thread from Gerry McGovern. He’s a bit of a guru in designing digital experiences and is also passionate about the impact that ‘digital’ is having on the environment.
‘Organisation with 100 million visits a year finds that 5% of its content is getting over 80% of visits. Over 100,000 pages have not been reviewed in 10 years.
We produce content. We do not manage it. 90% of content is crap. It was like this 25 years ago. It’s still the same.’
It made me think about the Scottish Enterprise website and whether we saw the same statistics. So, I asked our product owner David what our customers were looking at.
Continue reading “Let’s green our web : part 2”There is a campaign on Twitter this week (15th-19th February) #LetsGreenTheWeb to support and raise awareness of ClimateAction.tech. This prompted a discussion from a few of us here at Scottish Enterprise to look more closely at how we can reduce carbon emissions associated with our websites.
Continue reading “Let’s green the web”