Creating A Low-Carbon Website
Jordan Borg
Project Overview
Jordan Borg is a freelance copywriter and communications strategist focused on sustainability and social impact. She collaborates with startups and SMEs that are dedicated to making the world a better place.
Jordan was looking to build a bright and bold low-carbon professional website that reflects her values and personality. Working with a service provider that shares her values was important to Jordan, so we were honoured to have been selected to bring her website to life.
Key Features
- Low-carbon design
- Easily-updatable online portfolio
- Clear list of Jordan’s services
- Straightforward lead capture
Supporting Jordan's work
We worked together with Jordan to plan how her future website could support her freelancing business in a low-carbon way. The website needed to respond to three major needs: displaying Jordan’s portfolio, listing the services she offers, and capturing leads.
Prior to having a website, Jordan used a PDF portfolio to showcase her work to prospective clients. In addition to being inconvenient to update, sharing large attachments has a significant carbon footprint. By building Jordan’s portfolio into her website with Create’s drag and drop builder, we were able to reduce the carbon footprint of this important business activity, present Jordan’s work effectively, and simplify updating the portfolio.
In order to list the full range of copywriting and communications services Jordan offers without being visually overwhelming, we created a services ‘menu’ using emojis as bullet points—a reflection of Jordan’s personality. A dropdown button on each service allows visitors to learn more about that service if they wish.
And to facilitate lead capture, we developed a contact page that includes three options to get in touch, all without leaving the website: email, an embedded form from Jordan’s CRM, and an embedded Calendly meeting scheduler. This approach considers not only potential clients’ communication preferences, but different stages of their customer journey. To further support lead capture, we made sure to point visitors to the contact page at key moments throughout the website.
"After experimenting with a few ideas based on Jordan’s mood board, I wanted to create something minimalist that had an illustrated feel. The bold splashes of colour work to frame the content and the way palettes change as the visitor scrolls down the website adds depth and intrigue."
Ian Magill
Lead Website Designer
Carbon-friendly and effective design
Before the build began, Jordan kindly provided a wealth of reference material making the planning stages a fun and exploratory process. We looked at ways to reflect her personality through the design, keeping sustainability best practice in mind. Taking a minimalist approach allowed us to create a simple yet effective design. This decreases the amount of data that needs to be transferred to visitors’ devices, reducing carbon emissions.
The homepage is clear and concise, focusing on the essentials: a short, impactful tagline, a brief bio, and links to Jordan’s services and portfolio. A ‘Contact’ button helps visitors easily see how to get in touch. Jordan had plenty of positive client feedback. We placed these testimonials on every page to encourage trust and credibility with potential clients.
Images used on the website were resized appropriately for the space on the page to ensure they loaded as quickly as possible without losing any quality. When adding background images to the website, we fixed each image in place giving the effect that the content was scrolling over the top. We then used alternative colour palettes to distinguish each section on the page. Meanwhile, we opted to add certain text to white cards and apply box shadow to these cards as well as any images. The scrolling effect coupled with the box shadowing creates depth throughout the website.
Looking for help building a carbon-friendly website?
"When I saw the first draft of my website, I couldn’t stop smiling! It was so great to see what I had outlined in the planning stages brought to life. Ian, the lead designer on my site, really knocked it out of the park."
Jordan Borg
Copywriter & Communications Strategist
Achieving our carbon goal
Website Carbon states that the average web page produces around 0.8 grams of CO2 equivalent per pageview, meaning that 10,000 monthly page views would equal 102 kilograms of CO2e per year (the equivalent of charging 12,408 smartphones). We decided that a target of 0.25 grams would be a great number to aim for.
Website Carbon offer an embeddable badge that automatically calculates and displays the emissions of a webpage. Once Jordan’s website was complete, we added this badge to the bottom of the homepage. The result? The page produced 0.16 grams of CO2 per view, well below our 0.25 gram target and better than 85% of websites tested.
The Website Carbon badge is now placed at the bottom of each page on Jordan’s website, helping to raise awareness that websites generate carbon emissions and that reducing those emissions is possible through conscientious web design.
Carbon-friendly hosting with Create
If you’re interested in building or hosting a website sustainably, Create gives you a terrific head start! We build fully-responsive websites, store and optimise uploaded content on our content delivery network for quicker load times, offer carbon-neutral hosting, and have partnered with Ecologi to plant trees on your behalf to help offset any carbon emissions created by your website.
Want to discuss how we can create a low-carbon website for you?
