The future home of SW Designs

The SW Designs website has gone through several interations. We have decided that one more overhaul is necessary.

Why we are redesigning again

This is more than a vanity project. We made the mistake* of examining the energy resources our website used as part as an ongoing project to improve accessibility, and we were horrified to discover just how much energy our site utilised!

Since we are always advocating to our clients that they consider the enviroment as part of their website development process, we absolutely should the doing the same; we should be leading the way and setting the example.

Our goals for the new website

Just as we advise all our clients when developing their website, we started by putting together some ideas of what we wnated the final product to achieve for our business.

• The site has to be accessible to all and follow the WCAG guidelines as far as possible.
• We want to keep the site simple, almost brutalist - it makes for cleaner code and improves speed.
• The site should consume as little energy as possible. We have a few ideas in this regard, but for starters;
  • the website will be built using HUGO (a static site generator),
  • we will look at carbon neutral hosting (for both us and our clients),
  • we will offset any extra carbon use,
  • and we'll definitely consider the tools we use to build website, from laptops to printers, in an effort to further become carbon neutral.
• The website should be easy to navigate and users should find the site helpful.
• As per usual, a mobile first design process.

We are quite excited by the opportunity to re-design; much like the shoe maker's children, our very own website never got the attention it deserved.

* We say mistake, since it's led to having to rewrite the entire website, but on the otherhand it is a positive move since we'll be doing our part to help save the planet :)