Sustainable design

This site presents consulting work on sustainable digital practice. It would be poor form for the site itself to be wasteful. Here is what was done, and what was measured.

The design follows RGESN, the French general reference framework for sustainable digital services. The aim is not to earn a score but to genuinely reduce the resources each visit consumes.

The guiding principle is restraint by default: load nothing that does not directly serve reading the page.

• Pages are generated ahead of time and served as static HTML. The browser never talks to the database.
• No JavaScript is required to read the site. Switching language is an ordinary link.
• No fonts are downloaded: typography relies on faces already present on the device.
• No cookies, no trackers, no third-party resources.
• Images are sized and deferred. The stylesheet is a separate, cacheable file: measured, this transfers half as many bytes as inlining it into every page, from the second page onwards.
• The three language versions share the same assets, so they are downloaded only once.

This site was designed and developed with Claude Code (Anthropic), under my direction: data model, migration from Notion, templates, server configuration, publication safeguards. The choices described above were decided at each step.

That consumes resources, and it would be poor form to leave it out of this page. The cost does have one useful property: it is one-off, paid once at build time, whereas the cost of reading is recurring — paid by every visitor, on every visit. The table above measures the latter.

The consumption of those development sessions is not recorded here, for want of an instrument. No figure is therefore offered: the same rule as everywhere else on this page.

• 168 pages generated
• 1.6 kB of stylesheet, shared by every page
• 0 JavaScript file
• 0 third-party resource, cookie or tracker

The hosting footprint depends on the provider and its data centre’s electricity mix; it is not measured here.

An emissions estimate remains an estimate: it serves to compare versions of this site against each other, not to state an absolute figure.