Technological innovation
At Reuben, bespoke technical innovation is integral to every client project. We also pledge to develop solutions which conform to the following sustainable and ethical principles:
Building accessible websites
Published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WCAG is the consensus standard for digital accessibility and how we measure the accessibility standards of the systems we build. Using tools such as Google Lighthouse to measure the design and structure of the sites we build, our target is produce high scoring new websites and we will work with existing clients to assess the accessibility score for existing sites.
Building secure solutions
Our Microsoft Azure Cloud Hosting solutions are using state of the art Cloud and Virtualisation technologies, based in UK data centres, to provide fully backed up and secure hosting. We install SSLs on all websites and regularly review security risk in conjunction with our clients utilising external penetration testing services for both websites and infrastructure.
We are currently finalising our Cyber Essentials Plus Certification.
We develop software utilising the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) framework.
Building green solutions
The Internet consumes a lot of electricity, from the data centres and transmission networks to the devices that we use to connect to websites. The average web page tested produces approximately 0.5 grams CO2 per page view [3]. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that's 60 kg CO2 per year. We use a carbon calculator to measure the amount of CO2 emitted by the websites we develop. By fine-tuning our future technology stack, design principles, use accessible fonts and agile content, we aim to produce new websites that have a lower carbon footprint the industry average.
Bringing this intentionality into our design and build protocol doesn’t just affect the energy usage – it'll also make a site perform better, make it more user-friendly, more accessible and better optimised for search engines. It’s a win-win for client and planet!
Our websites are hosted by Azure who, as a part of Microsoft, has been 100% carbon neutral since 2012. They’ve committed to being powered by 100% renewable energy by 2025, carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050, they plan to remove all of the carbon from the environment that the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. We are therefore proud to display the Green Web Foundation’s logo on our own website to show the world that the hosting we have chosen is green.
Another of our major suppliers is Fasthosts – our domain registrar and email provider – and their UK data centres run on 100% renewable energy from offshore wind and biofuel.
We evaluate all of our suppliers on an ongoing basis to see where they are on their sustainable future journey, and pledge to change suppliers if their principles do not align with ours.
- Our first truly low-carbon website is now live and it’s the one you are currently reading! Our new Corporate Social Responsibility Policy website has not only been created on our new technology stack, it has also been designed and built with the latest sustainable web design principles in mind. Read more about these here. We are delighted that this website achieves a carbon rating of A (on a sliding scale of A+ to F, with A+ being the most ‘green’), as measured by the Website Carbon Calculator. This means that it is cleaner than 84% of web pages globally and emits just 0.23g of Co2 per page view. Our Ecograder report provides further details. We are now bringing these green coding and design principles to our clients’ web development projects, and if you are an existing client, it’s the perfect time to ask us to give your current website a ‘greening’ health check to reduce the emissions that your website produces each year. Get in touch to find out more.
- In April, we launched the first website on new technology stack…and a large website belonging to one of our oldest and most valued clients at that! The National Book Tokens website has been given a fresh new look & feel and combines several of their old sites into one exciting, multi-faceted online platform for purchasing giftcards and discovering the exciting world of books. Even before we have finished optimising the site’s performance, we have been pleased to see page size and load time speeds significantly better than the old site, which are both key areas for a low carbon score.
- In association with the project above, we’ve been experimenting with using BugHerd, a solution for our clients and our in-house testers to track amendments and record visual feedback on websites under development. We’ve been really pleased with how visual and easy it is to use, and how we can track and prioritise every comment. It’s a good example of how technology can make communications more efficient with the client.
- We continue to develop several client projects on our new technology stack, which is based upon the latest Microsoft ASP.NET Core / Blazor / C# frameworks and our adoption of DevOps to manage the projects is fast proving itself to be an excellent tool.
- Recently we conducted a performance audit for a website built by Reuben approaching 5 years ago, which was starting to show its age in terms of speed and performance. We were able to reconfigure the site with the latest image formats, carry out script and CSS optimisation to raise the website’s performance from 26% to 70% for mobile view and from 73% to 96% for desktop (PageSpeed Insights test, March 2023) – not a bad little MOT and a useful exercise we would like to extend to more of our long-serving clients.
- We have started developing the first client project on our new technology stack. This is based upon the latest Microsoft ASP.NET Core / Blazor / C# frameworks, and should give greater efficiencies on energy consumption, both server side, and client side, since there is less data exchange, and more computing is done at the server end of a user sessions, making browser usage lighter.
- We are in the early days of adopting DevOps as a methodology in our software development and management of software projects. It aims to increase our ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes by automating and unifying processes.
- The Green Team (mentioned above) will initially start by measuring the green credentials of the new technology stack against our old offering, ensuring all that we’ve adopted the cleanest/greenest coding practices to roll out on future projects. It will also be reviewing all of the services we provide to clients with a view to reducing the carbon emissions of the finished “product”.
- We are researching how Artificial Intelligence (AI) might be incorporated into our technology in the near future.