It’s been said that if the internet were a country, it would be the fourth-largest polluter in the world. That’s just one of many reasons why Pure Strategies was determined to redesign its website to align with social and environmental goals and adapt to more eco-friendly practices while providing a great online experience for our visitors.
As a Certified B Corp, we continue to strive to integrate our vision and mission for a more sustainable future into the way we run our company. Pure Strategies enlisted the creative expertise of Mangrove Web, a woman-owned website design company (and fellow B Corp), to help design a high-performing, secure, user-friendly website that incorporates best practices for accessibility and sustainability.
During our collaboration, the Mangrove team took the time to understand our business goals to create a website that improves accessibility, minimizes energy use, and ensures a positive overall user experience on any device.
Example actions taken to minimize energy use include:
- Selective use of images and longer content
- Applying manual scrolling
- Avoiding auto-run videos
- Using the most up-to-date, performance-focused technology to reduce overall page load
- Optimizing the site architecture to make key content faster and easier for visitors to find
- Limited the use of full-width banner images to balance visual impact with faster load times and lower energy use
- Designing on WordPress to automatically optimize image sizes by generating smaller versions – reducing load time and using less energy
Mangrove helped Pure Strategies to develop a website framework that also supports our goal to provide a fully accessible website experience for all users of all abilities, including those who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, screen enlargement software, and alternative keyboard input devices to navigate the web.
Ongoing efforts to ensure accessibility
Website accessibility is an ongoing process. We will continue to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 as our guiding principle for determining accessibility. These standards cover a wide range of recommendations and best practices for making content usable. As we add new pages and functionality to our website, all designs, code, and content entry practices will be checked against these standards.
Here are actions we have included in our new website to improve accessibility:
- High contrast text and background
- Alt Text image descriptions
- Use of headings, subheadings, and body text
- Keyboard navigation
“Our website redesign project was a huge undertaking, but we took on the challenge to build a more sustainable and accessible website that enables visitors to easily find the services and resources they need to help advance their sustainability programs,” notes Cheryl Baldwin, Vice President of Sustainability Consulting and Marketing and Business Development. “We hope this new website both inspires others to integrate sustainability throughout business operations and brings our client work to those looking to take the needed steps to help build a more sustainable future.”
