Environmental Literature | Social Justice | Sustainable Futures
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Final Project: An exploration of sustainable web design

April 10th, 2017 | Posted by Joe Jacob in Uncategorized

Thanks to significant increases in Internet connectivity speeds over the past few decades, browsers are able to load an average website’s content almost instantaneously without being seriously affected by bottlenecks derived from loading various kinds of media and assets, such as images or videos. Given this mitigated negative effect, many modern website designers are paying less attention to the size of their webpages and are building webpages that are increasingly dominated by different kinds of media. This negligence has resulted in large, asset-dependent webpages that require more energy to load which ultimately increases the environmental impact of browsing the Internet.

This final project explores the field of sustainable web design by analyzing different methods of reducing energy consumption within a webpage without sacrificing the quality of the website itself. These methods range from simply using different file types for media to having the website hosted by a more environmentally conscious web hosting provider. In addition to this research, the project incorporates a hands-on component of constructing a Google Chrome extension that implements options for reducing website energy consumption that are independent of the website designer’s control. Ultimately, this final project strives to not only educate Internet users on the impact of their daily browsing but also give them a user-friendly tool to reduce their browsing’s energy consumption without needing substantial experience on their own end.

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