Rick Nelson

Redesigned, but not energy-optimized
April 25, 2007

We’ve redesigned Test & Measurement World’s www.tmworld.com Website to help you find the information you need quickly and easily. Test & Measurement World has been an online pioneer among business magazines; our archived content extends back to 1996. But Web technology changes fast, and our updated site builds on the knowledge our Web designers have accumulated over the years to make the site easier for you to read, navigate, and comment on.

For example, its easy-to-read clean design emphasizes our daily news updates. An enhanced “talk back” function make it easy for you to tell us what you think. In addition, we’ve improved the site navigation, making it easy for you to find information in your area of interest, be it bench and modular instrumentation; design, production test, and yield; machine vision and inspection; communications test; compliance test; or automotive, aerospace and defense test.

Alas, our new site is not energy-optimized. I wasn’t even aware of the potential for Website energy-optimization until I came across this item yesterday in Salon’s “How the world works” department.

It turns out that, unsurprisingly, white pixels consume more energy than darker ones when displayed on a CRT. To exploit this fact in the saving of energy, designer Jon Doucette of Jonathan Design created a low-wattage palette, which you can see here at the ecoIron site.

But just how much money can an energy-optimized site save? For mostly white Google, with 200 million page hits per day, about 750 MWhr, or about $75,000 worth, per year, according to ecoIron proprietor Mark Ontkush. You can find his calculation of the savings here.

Of course, www.tmworld.com doesn’t get quite 200 million hits per day, so even had we opted for the low-wattage palette, our savings would have been less.

In any event, for an energy-efficient surfing experience, view our site on an LCD screen.

Posted by Rick Nelson on April 25, 2007 | Comments (0)