Witherford Watson Mann
Reducing emissions by 98.9%
The Project
Witherford Watson Mann (WWM) is a London based, Sterling award winning architectural studio based in London. They use the physical continuity of buildings to support the social transformation of cities and institutions with a focus on minimal but holistic intervention. WWM is highly attentive to social dynamics, cultural and heritage projects, working on projects from a human rights centre, to an art gallery and a nature reserve visitor centre. We partnered with WWM to rebuild their new website in its existing form, but with a focus on improving carbon load, functionality, loading time, accessibility and experience across devices.
What we did
- Reduced CO2 emissions by 98.9%
- Eliminated critical accessibility errors preventing users from navigating the site
- Provided a backend interface that is easier for the team to manage independently
reduction in carbon emissions
CO₂ per page view
lower emissions than average
The original WWM homepage emitting 14g CO₂ per page load, or the equivalent of driving a petrol car 54 miles for every 1000 visitors. This caused the website to be slow, both for visitors and for the WWM team when making updates. Similarly, the site hadn’t been built with accessibility best practices in mind, and there were a number of critical issues preventing users from navigating the site.
Before beginning work on rebuilding the website therefore, we ran an accessibility audit with our partners MyVision Oxfordshire, to identify these critical accessibility concerns to resolve. We took these findings, in addition to recommendations to reduce page size and CO₂ emissions, and transferred the old website over to WordPress from WWM’s previous CMS.
The result is a website that is lightning fast, with 98.9% lower emissions for the homepage. Accessibility has been improved significantly, with barriers that previously prevented users with assistive technology accessing the site eliminated.
