Built To Last - Sustainability On The Web

Mary Bowling | 12 May 2008 |

With plans of building a new house within the next few years, I’ve been researching green construction. The idea of the green movement is to promote sustainability, so naturally, it made me think about how to build a green - or sustainable - presence on the web.

Here are some sustainable building principals outlined by Jake Jacober, a contractor in the Roaring Fork Valley (Blizzard’s home) who’s been coloring his projects green for over 35 years, along with my thoughts on how they can translate to the internet.

Location
Your domain is your location on the web, so choose your URL wisely. While redirects are possible, starting with a good domain name will facilitate your online marketing efforts for many years to come.

Permanence
While there are people who are on the internet to make a quick buck, most of us want to create a sustainable internet presence that will last well into the future. We want to keep the Search Engines happy, so that our pages get into the indexes quickly and stay there. We want to boost our branding, increase targeted traffic and build a base of happy customers who return frequently and rave about us to their friends. By creating a solid foundation and continually strengthening an online business with incremental improvements, it can become a permanent part of the internet ecosystem.

Functionality
In a website, this translates to usability. Create a site that works well for both searchers and the Search Engines. Remove obstacles and provide clear navigation paths that enable visitors to move unhindered throughout the site.

Flexibility
The useful life of a website, like that of a building, is extended if it can be easily modified instead of having to be replaced when changes are needed. Choose a content management system carefully, but do choose one. You need to be able to add and rewrite content, change links, swap out pictures and graphics and include gadgets and widgets quickly and easily. Websites that require major code work to make changes are already dinosaurs and are well on the way to extinction.

Aesthetics
We have hundreds of millions of web pages to choose from, so if you want people to look at yours, they need to be attractive, interesting and fresh.

Safety
You need a host that can keep your website and email safe from hackers and spammers and insures optimal uptime for your servers.

Visitors to your site must feel, safe, too, in all of their interactions with it. They need to know that you’re a legitimate business with a decent reputation, that you won’t spam them or share the information they give you with anyone else and that their online transactions with you are secure.

Community
Use the web to become part of the communities that are (or can become) important to your online business. Position yourself for discovery on Social Media sites. Join the conversations. Engage with visitors to your website using blogs, surveys, tags, polls, bookmarks, widgets, wikis, forums and things that have yet to be developed.

Comfort
Once all the above green principals are applied to your presence on the web, your potential customers will feel comfortable doing business with you. You’ll have an attractive, easily found and easy-to-use website that’s bolstered by the trust from your branding, online reputation and the security features of your site.

You’ ll also feel much more comfortable investing your time, energy and money contructing a web site and internet presence that’s built to last and is sustainable well into the future.

Construction photo by Tengis

Computer photo by hyku