Signing up to the Good Business Charter
To demonstrate our commitment to good business practice, we applied to join the Good Business Charter. I'm very pleased to say that we have been accepted and are now an accredited organisation. Companies large and small have already joined this initiative which aims to improve business practices for the environment, customers, suppliers, tax and employees. This post talks more about the 10 components of the Good Business Charter and how you can become an accredited organisation as well.
Read moreJoining the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance
The internet uses around 3.7% of the world's electricity, which is more than the whole aviation industry. Websites contribute to this power consumption and, in turn, contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases. Hosting websites on servers that use renewable energy helps, but unfortunately, many hosting companies are not doing this. The AttractMore website has now been accredited by the Eco-Friendly Alliance (EFWA) as having low carbon emissions after an independent audit. The EFWA is a UK-based social enterprise that aims to make a positive impact on the environment by creating a greener internet. Their goal is 'to build on our global movement for a cleaner and greener internet' with '1 million climate-positive websites by 2030'. In this article you can discover ways of reducing the carbon emissions of your site and show your commitment to digital sustainability.
Read moreWant to save the planet? Start with your website
The data centres and telecoms networks used by the internet consume a huge amount of power, roughly the equivalent of all the electricity used by the UK. If we thought of the internet as a country, then it would be the 7th largest polluter in the world. Clearly, that's not OK. However, if you have a website, there are actions you can take to reduce the power consumption of the internet. Changing one website isn't going to make an impact, but neither is recycling one plastic bag. The impact becomes significant when we all take action collectively. And the effort involved in reducing the energy used by our sites is small. In this article, I'll talk about a number of ways in which you can make a difference.
Read morePassword mistakes you could be making
Passwords are, at the moment at least, an essential part of our online life both in a work and in a personal context. They are like keys to a door, but instead, they give access to our email, our social media accounts, our bank accounts, our websites. However, many people still tend to use passwords that can be easily guessed or cracked and so put their private information at risk of being discovered by hackers. In this article, I discuss 10 ways in which you can protect yourself on line using simple techniques that can increase the security of your passwords.
Read moreThe unreliable other - 3rd-party dependencies
Sometimes, in life, things we rely on don't work out as expected. It's the same with your website, especially with external services that your website relies on. However, there are ways of managing these 3rd-party dependencies so that they don't cause too much trouble. The external dependencies are, for example, fonts, videos, ads, reviews, analytics. The worst case scenario is that, if one of these services fails, it prevents your web pages from loading. I strongly suggest doing an audit of the external services your website uses and find ways of managing these so that if one does fail (or loads very slowly), it doesn't affect the load time of your web pages. Fast loading web pages are important to your users and important to search engines so worth getting to grips with this issue. Find out more here.
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