The Web Environmental Sustainability Guidelines (WESG) is a project born out of necessity to create a set of guidelines for agency teams and individuals to help implement low carbon design and development practices in order to reduce the negative impact on the environment created by websites and web applications.

Whilst there are many resources online concerning environmental design and low carbon, low energy websites we felt that there was a lack of guidance aimed specifically at web professionals and a lack of practical guidelines for teams to follow.

We acknowledge that the W3C has a working group to produce a set of standards for the production of environmentally conscious websites and our eventual hope is for the WES Guidelines to be superseded by these. However we also acknowledge that the production of these standards will take time to agree and put into practice, so we offer the WES Guidelines as a set of working principles that can be adopted for professionals and amateurs alike in the interim.

We hope you find these guidelines useful but we acknowledge that there is still work to be done. Please feel free to use the contribute form to get in touch and to feedback on the guidelines and to help steer the direction of future versions.