Tomorrow's web is « green »
The new cross-systems.ch website : Towards a « greener » website
What could be more natural than to take advantage of the redesign of the Cross Systems website to further strengthen our vision and values on a major digital topic: performance.
Today, when we talk about performance with our clients, we share with them a complex and multi-disciplinary vision that involves all the experts in our field (architects, developers, project managers, UX and UI designers, etc.).
The redesign of the official Cross Systems website has enabled us to highlight one key aspect of this vast subject: environmental performance and digital eco-design.
Eco-responsible design
When you decide to adopt an eco-responsible approach, you must know and master the impacts of your work, whatever is your role in the process of creating a website.
With the help of our experts in the field, we have endeavoured to apply the main rules of web eco-design as best we can.
It is important to understand that building an "eco-responsible" site aims to reduce its environmental impact as much as possible by relying on several good practices to be mastered during the design phase:
Aesthetic and functional simplicity
Reduction of "digital fat"
Mastery of interactions and animations
Optimisation of routes
Compatibility with older digital terminals
Green hosting and architecture reduction
Did you know that?
There are now over 5,000,000,000 Internet users and 40% of the world's population has an Internet connection (less than 1% in 1995)
The number of internet users increased tenfold between 1999 and 2013
The Internet represents a worldwide electricity consumption of more than 1500 TWH/year (3rd position in terms of electricity consumption behind China and the USA, i.e. 10-15% of the world consumption)
70 Kb of data allowed the Apollo mission to go to the Moon in 1969... that's less than the weight of an email today !
Every day, YouTube users spend over 1 billion hours watching videos
These figures are just a few examples and the impact we have on the planet is and will increasingly be a major issue for our industry.
The cross-systems.ch website
Drawing on all our expertise in the field of digital eco-design, the website was redesigned in an agile mode of operation, where the environmental aspect remained at the heart of the teams' concerns. The difficulty here, as in any digital project, remains the overall satisfaction of the various governors.
How to make a site rich, attractive and efficient ... but green?
There is no ready-made answer to this problem, but its solution lies in a certain balance between aesthetics and frugality, richness and efficiency, performance and accuracy.
Thus, based on all the established good practices and our experts, we have deployed an innovative architecture, based on the JAMStack concept.
JAMStack FTW !
Data centres have a huge impact on the environment and we can see today how much work the major cloud providers are doing to reduce this footprint.
A showcase or institutional site remains a presentation site, editorial, not transactional (or little).
The primary functionality of a web server, as its name indicates, is to serve files. Today, in most web architectures, a server generates pages from data stored in a database thanks to a programming language, performs more or less heavy processing, requiring a lot of resources (CPU, RAM, disk space).
How do we get a greener project like cross-systems.ch back to the primary purpose of a web server, which is to serve static files?
It is in this context that we relied on the concept of JAMStack, JavaScript, API and Markup :
JavaScript manages the functionality through a front-end framework (here VueJS)
Backend operations are carried out from remote services connected via API, with an even greater choice for us to rely solely on SaaS services
The HTML documents (Markup), are generated as static files via a static site generation solution (NuxtJS on our project)
By designing the site in this way, you only host simple HTML files, generated by your upstream file generation engine. With this approach, you build a scalable, extensible, lightweight site on "intelligence-free" servers and ultra-low operating costs (no risk of over-consumption, CPU or RAM).
Beyond the architectural aspect and its profitability, you naturally ensure better display performance, whether on mobile or desktop terminals, a major subject today with direct impacts on your referencing and conversion rate in particular.
Coming back to the environmental impact of this platform and relying in particular on a local green hosting, named Hidora. We reduce our energy needs to a minimum, which is crucial for an eco-responsible approach.
With this architecture, we can then implement and deploy all our SEO, UX, UI and technical expertise to build a greener, more environmentally friendly site.
Try by yourself !
