Eco-design: choose responsible web design with Esokia

Eco-design, also known as Green UX or eco-design, is now integrated naturally into web development. This strategy enables a concrete reduction in the environmental impact of websites and applications through a number of best practices. For businesses, it is a crucial component of communication…

At a time when digital pollution contributes up to 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Esokia has decided to integrate eco-design into its processes.

Esokia, a strong commitment to responsible web development

Through the implementation of a series of eco-design best practices, Esokia's developers participate in collective efforts in favor of the environment. Our agency can say to this day that the websites and applications designed and developed by our specialists : 

• Offer equal quality performance to non-eco-design ones;
• Use only the resources needed to operate;
• Provide a better user experience through improved uniformity and consistency of functionality;
• Have faster response times.
   

In short, eco-design is not a process of saving energy and resources, but a rational and thoughtful use of these elements.
 

Did you know?

Web pages have grown! In only 20 years, their weight has multiplied by almost 115!

Esokia's best practices in eco-design

Eco web design goes through several pivots: design, incorporation, front-end and back-end development, web hosting and finally, content. Let's look at each element individually.

Eco web design

The eco-design of a website or web application is a crucial step in a process to reduce environmental effect. When the client and the developers determine the functionalities, it begins very early. Therefore, it is crucial to

• Quantify exactly what the company needs;
• Model the IT charter, which should be simple, but effective;
• Set up the responsive version of the site or application;
• Choose the necessary technologies, frameworks and CMS.

This is for : 

• Select only the most relevant features;
• Quantify exactly what resources are needed;
• Define a scope of green development that echoes the company's business approach, SEO strategy and the customer experience it wants to deliver.

Incorporation of models

This step consists of translating the models into computer programming language, for example, HTML, JavaScript, etc. This is how the information becomes readable through web browsers. The best eco-design practice for this step is to :  

• Generate Sprite Sheets;
• Systematically add a CSS printout;
• Use only good quality but reasonable images and formats;
• Outsource CSS and JavaScript files to gain efficiency;
• Have all technical specifications of the pages validated by the W3C Validation Service.

Better front-end and back-end development

To make all the elements visible and accessible on a website, front-end developers define the general structure and content of a document using HTML. They use, for example, CSS for style and language while JavaScript is used for more complex interactivity. They can also implement AJAX, which is a combination of JavaScript and XML, for precise updates without having to code the entire page. 

Today, thanks to Green UX, they can continue to fully exploit these programming languages, but this time in a more rational, proportionate and frugal way, without losing efficiency, on the contrary.
 

Esokia's best practices for an eco-design front-end development: 

• Simpler JavaScript codes (with a limited amount of animation);
• A simple but stable Document Object Model (DOM);
• Use of optimized caching systems;
• Respect front-end coding norms.

As for the back-end developers, using PHP, Python, Ruby, Java and Node.js, but also SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL, they ensure the proper functioning of the website or the application on the server side. To do this, they intervene on the databases, the back-end logic, the application programming interface (API), the architecture and the servers. Eco-design allows optimizing all these elements to reach a maximum efficiency.

Esokia's best practices for an eco-design back-end development: 

• Use of templating engines;
• Optimization of memory management, SQL queries ;
• Better connection management for BDD;
• Use of stored procedures.

Optimized website hosting

In addition to choosing an eco-responsible host, our eco-design web development agency :

• Minimizes and combines CSS and JavaScript;
• Enables HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security);
• Incorpore les caches dans la RAM du système;
• Utilize asynchronous servers.

Better use of content

Content is anything that can be downloaded and printed on a website. Here again, we choose to apply good eco-design practices, i.e. :

• By prioritizing document compression;
• By choosing formats adapted to the web for images, videos and texts;
• By preferring plain text format to HTML for sending emails, notifications, etc.

For a responsible website or application, the web development agency has already integrated the best practices in eco-design into its process.