STUDIO
Environmental Policy
How BrainWeb thinks about the environmental side of building websites, and what we will and will not claim about it.
Our approach
BrainWeb is a small studio, and the honest truth is that the biggest environmental difference a web studio makes is in the quality of what it builds, not in grand statements about it. A website that loads fast, carries little weight, and lasts for years uses less energy over its life and needs replacing less often. That is where we put the effort, and it is built into how we work rather than added as a marketing line.
This policy sets out what that means in practice, and it's deliberately careful about what it claims. We would rather state a little that is true and verifiable than a lot that isn't.
What we actually do
We build light, fast sites. Performance is treated as part of the design, not a tuning step at the end. A lighter site transfers less data with every visit, and over thousands of visits that adds up. The static-first approach we favour for modern builds (pages built ahead of time and served as files) is genuinely efficient, with little running on a server between visits.
We build sites that last. A site that stays useful for years, rather than being rebuilt every couple of years, is the less wasteful option by a wide margin. Longevity is a design goal here for several reasons, and this is one of them.
We run a lean operation. A small, largely remote studio carries a small operational footprint. There is no large office to power and no fleet to run.
Hosting and suppliers
The energy behind a website is largely the energy behind the servers that host it, which means it sits with our hosting suppliers rather than directly with us.
Where a supplier runs on renewable energy and publishes current, independently verifiable information to that effect, we take that into account when choosing who to work with. We will reference a supplier's renewable-energy credentials only at the supplier level, only where the claim is current and verifiable, and only on the specific service it applies to. We don't restate it as a BrainWeb-wide claim.
What we don't claim
We do not market BrainWeb as carbon-neutral, and we do not make carbon-neutral claims about our services. We previously did, and have stepped back from it because we cannot currently verify it to the standard our own house style demands: every claim we make should be true, specific, and something a client could check.
This isn't a retreat from caring about the environmental side of the work. It's the same discipline applied to it as to everything else we say. When there is a claim we can stand behind and verify, we will make it. Until then, the work itself is the policy.
Review
This policy is reviewed at least every six months, in April and October, and immediately whenever a supplier's credentials change or a new verifiable claim becomes available.