Tag Archives: green

The Scottish Rhododendron Society Web Design

The Scottish Rhododendron Society

The Scottish Rhododendron Society required a website to showcase there photographs and highlight the society membership benefits.

Their old website had confusing navigation which made it difficult to access pages in an easy way.

I wanted to feature a large slider on the front page to immediately showcase the Rhododendron  flowers.

This is another Wordpress based website which allows the members of the society to log into the website and post their own images and start discussions.

The Scottish Rhododendron Society

Technology Used

WordPress
Adobe Fireworks
Adobe Photoshop

Sustainable Software?

Adobe’s Green Credentials

I have been using software developed by Adobe (previously Macromedia products) for well over a decade now.

I never new until recently how committed they are to sustainable practices for the reduction of their carbon footprint.  They highlight waste reduction, energy conservation and the construction of green buildings as their main environmental commitments. Maybe they have created sustainable software?

Big corporate businesses have a duty to improve their green credentials and I feel that Adobe have shown the way forward.

CC or nor CC?

I disagree with their recent change to CC products where you only rent their software on a pay per month package, although it has some benefits. On a positive note there are lower start-up costs required for their software suite but to never actually own the product is disappointing, especially as many web designers and developers feel tied into their system now.

I have also found it to be a bit buggy with the occasional crash resulting in lost work. This never happened before with my individual boxed purchases over the years.

Here is a link to their corporate responsibility and sustainability page.

External link to Adobe

Sustainable web design

I am interested in the concept of creating sites which are less harmful to the environment. The most damaging aspect of some designs is the size and amount of images on a site. Higher emissions of CO2 are produced by large image dominated sites, due to more loading and processing.

If you must have images on your site then reducing the original size and optimising them for the web is essential.

Choosing a web host which uses sustainable energy such as solar or wind power for hosting your site can be another step towards your green credentials.