Inspiration can come from unexpected sources.

Take this article for example. It’s about websites but it was inspired by camping mattress repairs. The LLM in my head had some strange training materials. Bear with me though, it will all make sense. 

The mattress repair conundrum

If you’ve been camping this summer, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve woken up with a painful achy sensation due to a deflated mattress, better known as “Overnight matt deflation syndrome” or OMDS. You’re not alone. Punctured mattresses present a huge issue for companies like Decathlon as well as their users. They offer repair services and fixing leaky air mattresses is apparently one of their most popular requests. The fix is simple – find the hole and apply a patch. Finding the hole can be tricky and time consuming though. The time factor is the issue here because it makes repairing the mattress uneconomical. 

So given the scale of issue, they broke down the problem to its definitive part – identifying where the leak was. They approached the challenge laterally and thought about what other industries might have experienced this sort of problem and had already solved it. This led them to an unlikely place. The fossil gas industry. 

Gas leaks are a huge problem for the fossil fuel industry. They can be costly and hard to find, just like they are for, err, camping mattresses. So they developed a solution. Using a special camera and microphone, they check pipelines for leaks. The microphone identifies the sound of leaks (pfft) and pinpoints it on the camera screen. Engineers can then tag the pipeline and make a repair. 

Decathlon found that this technology can be used for their repairs too. It slashed the time required to patch a leak to a handful of minutes and made the repair offering viable again. When it’s fully rolled out it has the potential to massively reduce waste and increase customer satisfaction. 

Camping mattresses are like websites

The genius of this idea from Decathlon is not the use of technology to solve a problem, it’s in identifying the core of the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus too hard on the overall problem you can end up missing potential solutions from other, unexpected places. If you remove the product, client, sector or industry from the equation and just try to solve the core user/customer problem, inspiration can come from anywhere. 

This is something Wholegrain practices across our projects and clients. Our user centric, Humane Web approach helps us focus on the need, not the problem at hand. We’re sector agnostic, which is a fancy way of saying that if a solution from one sector can work for another, we’ll use it. A simple example might be using e-commerce inspired product filters to make it easier to find articles on a large media site. 

What do heart surgeons and transport planners have in common?

We’re not just looking for features though, it’s about the shared needs of projects too. Two of our most recent site builds, EACTs and UITP are great examples. On the face of it, a site for Cardiothoracic surgeons should have little in common with one for Public Transport professionals. But when you look at the needs of the two sets of users, you find much more common ground.

Both sites are for Membership organisations, so they need to provide relevant information about things like events, industry news and best practices. We can take tried and tested ways of sharing news for heart surgeons and apply them for transport planners. The lessons from a transport summit site can improve the user experience for medical professional conference sites. 

Different missions, shared goals 

This user centric approach helps us share solutions and experience for clients who have similar goals but are at different stages in their journeys too. Environment Bank and Good Energy are two of our clients with sustainability at the core of their operations. They’re both on a mission to make the UK greener, cleaner and more bio diverse but work in very different sectors. Despite this, some of their core user problems are very similar and solutions can be shared between the sites. 

Part of their challenge is helping UK businesses to transition to working in ways that decarbonise and restore natural habitats, to improve the local and national environment. Environment Bank does this by helping developers meet their legal bio-diversity commitments through consultation and habitat banks. Good Energy is helping decarbonise the energy sector through renewable energy provision and support for lower carbon technologies like EVs and heat pumps. 

A big challenge for both companies comes down to education, information and persuasion. The design techniques, user experiences and features that Good Energy have been using can help to inform what users need for an organisation like Environment Bank, just like with EACTs and UITP. Users are looking for solutions to environmental problems and want clear, easy to digest information to help them make positive changes. 

For an organisation like Environment Bank their offering is less well known than the renewables that Good Energy offers. But Good Energy has also been in the position of offering different ways of doing things that required reassurance and confidence to persuade users. We can apply the lessons from more mature organisations to organisations who are earlier in their development. No matter what stage they are at, these users for these organisations’ sites have similar needs. Focussing on the needs means more solutions.

Focussing on users is our super strength 

When you look at our portfolio of sites and clients, you’ll see a diverse set of organisations, sectors and industries. The thing they share is that they want to work with a sustainably minded agency to further their positive goals. This diversity means that we’ve got a huge breadth of experience meeting a wide range of user requirements. Our sites are robust, humane, digitally sustainable, performant, but most importantly user-centric. After all it’s their problems we need a site to solve, no matter what they are. 

If you’ve got a web project you’d like to discuss, reach out to Bailey to find out how this approach could work for you. 

You’ll find more insights into our working practices in this range of articles on our Humane Web approach.

The climate crisis won’t solve itself. 

It’s going to require a shift in the way we all live our lives on a day to day basis. Climate science has a consensus on the solutions. But some of our fossil fuel enabled habits are going to have to change. We will require a change in mindset but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. 

Some of our policies at Wholegrain reflect the sort of changes that would help. 

For instance, plant based meals reduce the environmental footprint of food production. Wholegrain has a vegan and vegetarian meals policy in line with this. It doesn’t mean meals are boring though. Our Christmas dinner at Mallow could be described in many ways;   sustainable, innovative, delicious, but definitely not boring. 

Prioritising low carbon transport over air travel is another thing advocated for by climate scientists. This does require a shift in mindset but the results can be amazing. Our no flight policy can mean a bit of additional planning. But the combination of lower emissions and more adventure makes for the best stories. Just ask our founders Tom & Vineeta and our Technical Delivery Lead Tommy.

Diet and travel are two areas where personal tastes and habits can support can aid systematic transformation. In reality we’re in a polycrisis and change is required across all aspects of daily life. The truth is that the climate crisis won’t be solved by any single action or group of people. We need actions on policy and governmental levels to help organisations and individuals to transition to a lower carbon, less environmentally destructive way of life.

We urgently need that change to come. Our client Carbon Brief‘s daily email briefings offer insights into the risks we face. A recent email shared a report that Europe recorded over 10,000 excess deaths in the heatwaves in late June.

It’s scary to think that this is likely to become the new normal. 

In this context, it’s important to remember that there is hope.  

There are organisations out there fighting on our behalf and advocating for the change we need. When I chatted to colleagues for our last article, the work our clients are doing came up a lot. When you read about their work, it paints a more hopeful and optimistic light.

I’d like to share some of that optimism with you now. 

In this (non-exhaustive) article, I’ll show you how some of our clients are advocating for governmental policy change, enabling habitat restoration, improving our built environment, and accelerating the transition to renewable energy. 

The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment – Shaping Policy Change

Climate change requires top down, systemic change. Joined up, long term, resilient climate policies need expert advice, analysis and research. This is something that our client, Grantham, knows all about. The institute is hosted by the Global School of Sustainability at the London School of Economics. They enable “a sustainable, inclusive and resilient world, pursued through research, policy analysis and training on climate change and the environment”. 

How they help –  Framework to policy Adaptation Investment Framework. 

It’s clear that the UK, along with the rest of the world, has to work to adapt to climate change. Part of the challenge is bridging the gap between these adaptation requirements and the finance required. Grantham is working with DEFRA to develop a new Adaptation Investment Framework (AIF) to meet this challenge. The framework provides a toolkit for the Government, real economy actors and financial institutions to mobilise the required investment, fast and at scale.

How Wholegrain supports Grantham’s mission

We launched Grantham’s current site in 2020 and have been collaborating with them ever since. The site looks as clean and modern today as it did on launch day, something that is a testament to the brief they provided and the work done by the project team. Like the policies they institute, advocates for the site are robust, future proofed and low carbon. 

Since the launch, we’ve worked to ensure the site maintains its high levels of performance, usability and accessibility. Optimising on site search and improved article filtering have been key to this. 

Find out more about the work with Grantham here.

Good Energy – Transitioning the UK to renewable energy

The first message you see when visiting Good Energy’s site is “THE WORLD NEEDS MORE GOOD ENERGY”. The energy in question is 100% British-made renewable electricity from independent producers. In a warming world, where burning fossil fuels is exacerbating the heatwaves, this type of “Good Energy” is exactly what we need more of. 

Good Energy is a sustainable alternative who delivers higher standards than their less sustainable competitors. High levels of customer satisfaction and service led to multiple awards from Which? Did we mention that they’re also BCorp certified? 

Basically, they are just really good at what they do. The fact that what they’re doing helps the UK to transition away from fossil fuels is a lovely bonus. 

How they help – Switching tool & Energy Market Reform report 

Aside from their service, they help individuals and organisations in other ways. Their switching tools are a simple way for prospective customers to move to renewables (individuals & businesses). But Good Energy can help businesses go a step further. Their solar installation service is perfect for businesses that want to cut energy costs and increase resilience. 

Like Grantham, they also use their expertise to influence policy. Their latest report on energy market reform is a great example. It argues that the only way the Government can ensure long term price stability for the UK is to move away from gas generation to a renewable energy mix.

How Wholegrain support Good Energy’s mission 

We designed and launched Good Energy’s site in 2021 and have been with them every step of the way since. Our bold design supports the story telling elements of the site. We’ve been on hand to evolve user experience tweaks and add new features as Good Energy grows. User journeys are continually smoothed and optimised ensuring that switching to a renewable tariff is a breeze. 

Find out more about the work with do with Good Energy here. 

UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) – Making the UK’s build environment more resilient and fit for purpose 

The recent heatwaves highlighted how the UK’s buildings and housing stock are inadequate for a warming planet. Renters, homeowners and businesses struggled to keep their buildings cool enough to live and work. It’s clear that something needs to change. 

Enter the UKGBC.

How they help –  UK Climate Resilience Roadmap and other resources. 

The UKGBC is on a mission to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment in the UK. They want to transform how buildings are planned, financed, designed, constructed, maintained, operated and repurposed.  Their 2030 roadmap sets out four key strategic goals:

1. A Shared Sustainability Vision – Foster collaboration and consensus across the sector
2. Moving from Intent to Action – Accelerate industry-wide action  toward sustainability                                      
3. Influencing Policy and Advocacy – Influence progressive policy  frameworks and business models                                       
4. Building Capacity and Leadership – Build skills and leadership for systemic change

2030 is not far away, but the UKGBC believes that we need to act immediately. “The UK’s built environment is facing an urgent reality: climate hazards are no longer future threats but immediate dangers”. 

Their recent UK Climate Resilience Roadmap sets out a vision for a climate resilient built environment, sharing clear recommendations for the industry and policy, and next steps needed to increase the climate resilience of our built environment. It identifies 5 major climate hazards threatening the UK and uses evidence to argue that “acting now is the only responsible choice”.

The report offers evidence backed methods to meet the challenges the UK faces as well as the policy changes required to make them a reality.  

How Wholegrain support UKGBCs mission 

In 2023, we helped UKGBC align their ambitions for the physical environment with their digital presence. Their site is one of the most innovative we’ve ever built, with the team at UKGBC wholeheartedly buying into our vision. Since launch, we’ve worked closely with their team to elevate their new initiatives digitally and optimise engagement.

Their appetite for digital innovation remains high. One of our most recent projects for them involved adding an AI chatbot to help surface more information and ensure that their wide range of resources are as discoverable as possible. 

You can read more about the project and how we support UKGBC here.

Environment Bank – Restoring nature and improving biodiversity

If you spend as much time reading sustainability news sites as I do, you might be aware that carbon capture schemes have been in the news recently. Microsoft has just slashed its investments in the technology. Questions remain about its efficacy and scalability.

Thankfully, nature has some pretty effective methods of carbon sequestration with habitat restoration playing a key part of this. We are lucky to support the Environment Bank, one of the best organisations in the field.  

How they help – Creating biodiversity gains

Environment Bank is the nation’s leading biodiversity gains specialist, restoring habitats across England. They work to create Habitat Banks, taking parcels of low-quality, often monocultural land and transforming them into thriving biospheres perfect for native flora and fauna. 

These Habitat Banks allow developers to meet their Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements for new builds and renovation projects. To meet planning conditions, developers must demonstrate that they will improve biodiversity as part of the project. Where it is not possible to offer a net gain of biodiversity on site, such as this project in Rochdale. Environment Bank allows developers to find tailored solutions and meet their BNG requirements.

How Wholegrain contributes to Environment Banks’ mission 

The concept of BNGs is not the easiest to clearly communicate (though I hope I have done it justice above!). Environment Bank needed a website that clearly explained their market leading projects to multiple audiences. They needed to showcase the value of their Habitat Banks and do justice to their award winning brand. We worked with them in 2025 to build a site that does just that. 

With a diverse audience and differing user journeys to consider, our discovery process laid the foundations for a successful project. Our work to understand the site audiences, coupled with some creative, sustainable web design and bespoke features such as an interactive map creates a site the team can be proud of. 

You can find out more about the work with do with Environment Bank here. 

What cause can we help you further?

Wholegrain offer a range of digital services to help you and your organisation combat the climate crisis as sustainably as we know how. From maintenance contracts to full site builds and digital sustainable transformation consultancy, we’re here to help.

Contact Bailey to find out how.

I don’t know about you, but I found June’s heatwave pretty scary. It felt relentless and sapping and troubling. All across the UK, we saw records for high day time and night time temperatures tumble as things heated up.

The average temperature in my village in France was around 36 degrees at 650m above sea level. We haven’t had the worst of it here, with much of central France suffering record breaking temperatures above 40 degrees for multiple days. The heatwave continues to spread across Europe as I write.  

The often unspoken truth is that climate change made the heat more intense. 

In this report from Carbon Brief they lay things bare. “Climate change is unequivocally to blame”, noting that the scorching temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” 50 years ago. This wasn’t 1976, it was hotter and more widespread. 

These record temperatures have tangible real world impacts. 2000 deaths have been attributed to the heatwave in France and Spain.The UK suffered travel issues, hospitals were overwhelmed by increased demand and critical hospital infrastructure struggled to cope. 

Travel disruption and iced treats

As the heat abated, conversations turned away from frozen snacks to more important things. This article was meant to be a round up of the LCAW events that our team attended, and our clients were involved in. 

The heatwave changed all that.

During discussions this week, the topic shifted to how people and companies might take action in the wake of the heatwave. It’s important to remember that this wasn’t just another hot few days. More episodes like this are likely to come. How can we use our agency to take meaningful action? 

Taking action

Our first suggestion is to attend a screening of the National Emergency Briefing on Climate as a number of our team have. The film is a powerful reminder of the challenges we face but also that action is possible. Not only do the solutions to the climate crisis already exist, but they need implementation.  

You can find public screenings in the UK here. 

For workplace screenings, Business Declares can help facilitate these events. Contact samantha@businessdeclares.com to discuss. 

As well as a workplace screening, there are a number of other actions businesses can take. 

Becoming a business member of Business Declares is a great place to start. Alternatively your organisation could throw its support behind the BCorp Better Business Act, a campaign to amend the Companies Act. The campaign asks the government to amend Section 172 of the Companies Act to legally empower UK businesses to balance the long-term interests of people, planet, and profit. Signing up to support the campaign triggers a letter to be sent to your local MP  

If you work in the creative sector, you could join Wholegrain and thousands of organisations and individuals in taking the Clean Creatives pledge. Climate change is scientifically proven to be caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies have long known of the risks their operations pose. Despite this, they have lobbied hard to hide this knowledge and delay action. 

Pledging not to work for the fossil fuel industry helps the world take a step towards de-carbonisation. 

If you work in the digital sector, you can support this move in another way. The Green Web Foundation is campaigning for the decarbonisation of the internet. Their Fossil Free Internet report on Data Centers is eye opening and shocking. Thankfully it offers three solution pathways to improve things and support the other initiatives listed in this article.

Start small, think big

Whatever you do, the important thing is that you can do something. Small steps can quickly add up to become major changes. At Wholegrain we’ve been working towards a more sustainable digital industry for over a decade. It’s never felt more important than it does now. 

If you’re feeling inspired, keep an eye out for our next blog. We will cover some of the amazing work that our clients do and how you can get involved. 

Today’s post is a collaboration between myself, Tom Greenwood, and Michael Andersen, a fellow digital sustainability advocate and author of the book Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons.

Michael got in touch with me recently with a rather interesting question — if people are increasingly getting their information directly from AI services like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, should we still be designing websites for humans? Put another way, is the primary audience for a website in the future going to be non-human intelligence?

This is a rather provocative question, and as Michael and I both care deeply about the environmental and social impact of the web, it is one that we should not ignore.

Of course, the idea that we might have to consider robots when designing a website is not entirely new. There has long been a tension between the need (and desire) to provide the best experience to human users while also needing to optimise websites for higher search rankings. The robots have been exerting power over us for a long time already. However, until recently the robots were simply the gatekeepers controlling who actually finds their way into our websites. With the rise of AI services, the robots are stealing our content and locking the gates behind them. 

This poses some interesting challenges for any person or organisation that has a website, and in the process forces us to ask some deeper questions about what we actually want the Internet to be moving forward. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is an inherently bad thing, and it’s certainly not all good, but Michael and I want to hold space to consider the challenges alongside the possibilities with open minds, to imagine how we might evolve the web positively for this new era.

The AI traffic paradox

In recent times we’ve seen a number of clients at Wholegrain Digital experience significant spikes in their web hosting traffic as a result of AI bots constantly crawling their pages for information. This can come at a real financial cost to the client, not to mention the environmental impact, and it raises the question over whether we should block AI bots from our websites.

At the same time though, Michael highlights that some organisations have seen significant drops in web traffic coinciding with the rising popularity of AI services such as ChatGPT. At Wholegrain we have seen ChatGPT appear as a new traffic source for some websites, but at this stage it’s mostly a small one, as fewer people tend to click back to websites from their AI answers compared to traditional search engine results. Not to mention the fact that Google now provides AI answers at the top of its search results these days, reducing the need for the website “visitor” to um… visit. 

So we have AI companies causing a significant increase in artificial traffic to websites, while also reducing the human traffic to those same websites. And yet the place where these AI tools get their information from are these very same websites. Websites that people have invested a lot of time and money into designing, building, and maintaining, as well as creating content for.

This article isn’t about arguing the injustice of this situation, but to sit with it and acknowledge that we are in something of a paradox. AI services need a thriving Internet full of rich information in order to do what they do, yet they simultaneously erode the incentive for people and organisations to invest in creating a thriving web. The snake is eating its own tail.

Visiting the source

In our discussions, Michael highlighted a key feature of this changing dynamic being that websites are increasingly treated as sources of information, rather than destinations to visit. If AI companies have their way, much like social media, people will spend most of their time on these new platforms and not leave. In this sense they really don’t care about your website other than it being a source of data to mine. 

But it’s likely that if you have a website, then you do care that people visit. You likely have reasons, whether commercial or not, to want real human beings to visit your website. You could, as some are doing, block AI crawlers from your website to discourage them from mining your website and attempt to ensure that the information on your website is really only available by visiting your website. This may work for some, but as people increasingly use AI tools as search engines, blocking AI crawlers entirely is not dissimilar to blocking Google from your website. It’s a bold and admirable ethical stance, but it might not be very practical in many cases. So what can we do instead?

My personal view is that we may need to design hybrid websites, facing the tension head on by separating the needs of humans from the “needs” of robots, but neglecting neither. We can compartmentalise, at least partially, the destination for humans, and the source of data for machines. In doing so, we might actually create a win-win and unleash a new wave of human creativity in web design, reversing the long term trend of websites “all looking the same.” Let me explain.

The human experience

One of the things that this new dynamic highlights is that some people go online in search of answers to questions, and LLMs are increasingly taking this role. However, the user experience of LLMs tends to come in the form of long text based responses, or a digital voice speaking these same answers. What they don’t provide is the rich, immersive experience that has for a long time been a significant part of what people enjoy about going online. It could be argued that in the past decade or so, as User Experience “best practices” have become more firmly established and websites have been optimised for search rankings, the web has become increasingly bland compared to its earlier days when website design was a truly creative practice.

We now have an opportunity to reverse that trend by prioritising the human visitor not just in terms of ease of use, but in terms of the richness of experience that we offer people. Websites that are truly beautiful, immersive, joyful and thought provoking in their design, and which people want to visit because they are places that people actually want to be rather than just sources of dry information.

This also includes the tone of voice of the content, which is generally very bland in LLM tools but can be much more expressive on your own website, especially if there is now less need to awkwardly jam our content full of SEO keywords. This will allow us to enrich people’s experiences and convey the spirit of our brands in ways that an LLM likely won’t, making our own websites a more authentic expression of what we really have to say.

We could compare this to the shift we are seeing in high streets, whereby generic, uninspiring shops have struggled to compete with online retailers, but it has left an unmet need for unique, enjoyable experiences that people cannot get from shopping on Amazon. When high street retailers shift their perspective to see themselves as destinations to be experienced rather than just places to buy things, people do make the effort to leave their homes and go into town. Similarly, when we view websites this way and design experiences that people genuinely enjoy visiting and even want to share with their friends, we create something that the LLMs cannot replicate, even if they steal some of our content.

Of course, my comparison with high streets runs out here as some of the organisations that have the greatest opportunity to do this are likely those with some element of e-commerce. There is an inherent opportunity to inspire potential customers with rich visual information about the products, and interactive tools to help them understand products better and choose what is right for them. Of course we want to do this in a way that is accessible and environmentally efficient, but there are huge opportunities here for creativity. To quote my colleague Chânelle Sharp, a designer at Wholegrain, “the design of websites will shift to work even harder for the user now”. I think that is a good thing, with web design in the near future becoming much more about digital storytelling.

People are time poor and so instead of wasting their time with large reams of text intended mostly for Google, user experiences could actually cut back significantly on written text in many cases and just give people exactly the information they need, in a beautiful and engaging format. And despite the downsides of these AI tools, it may just be that AI coding tools in the long term will make it easier for organisations to create rich functionality and design features such as visualisations, personalisations, dashboard, calculators, and interactive journeys, that were previously beyond their budgets. It may well be therefore that AI coding will gradually reduce one of the key limiting factors in doing really exciting things online.

Then come the robots

If we design websites primarily for humans once more and relegate the AI and search crawlers to second class citizens of the web, then you may be wondering, how do you get your website featured in search results and AI responses? I think the answer might be to have a secondary layer of a website that is purely informational, with large repositories of high quality written information and raw data relating to your organisation and area of expertise. These repositories can include high quality original data, white papers, academic research and the like, making them a rich source of quotable information for the LLMs. These pages can be crawled by crawlers without getting in the way of human visitors, and to quote Chânelle again, “if the information is purely informational, then maybe it doesn’t even need to be designed”. This second layer of a website could be super efficient by virtue of not being mixed in with the presentation elements such as imagery and custom fonts that are there only to improve the experience of humans.

But what if your visitors do want to access some of this information from your data repository while they are on your website? This is where a more efficient LLM tool tailored just to your website may provide the answer. Tools such as HOLP, which we used for the UK Green Building Council, can provide answers to the questions of the people who have arrived at your website, without them having to leave your website and unlike mass market AI tools, they can provide trusted answers as they are trained to provide information from your own websites information repository (as well as its user facing web content). This is a win for the human visitor who is seeking specific information that may not be easy to find in the standard user facing content, and for the organisation who is able to meet the unique needs of such visitors without complicating the user experience for other people.

I’ll hand over to Michael now to discuss how some of this might be achieved on a practical level.

Down at street level

I want to begin by saying how excited I have been to write this alongside Tom. Ever since I first read his book Sustainable Web Design, he has been a constant source of inspiration to me. The hybrid idea he lands on, a light and human surface sitting on top of a denser layer meant for machines, is the thread I want to follow, though I would not want to give either of us too much credit for it, since the web has been built in roughly this shape for a long time and most of us have simply taken it for granted. What feels worth examining now is not the layers themselves, but the question of who that hidden layer is increasingly being built for, and that is where my own corner of the work comes in.

That corner is the code itself, where I tend to sit rather than up above it looking at the strategy. Tom has been describing the shape of all this from above, the way you might look down at a city and see how the roads connect to one another, and I want to stay down at street level for the rest of this, because it is down there that the same question we kept circling stops being philosophical and turns into something you can put your hands on. It becomes a question about which file you create, and what you put in it, and who you imagine reading it. So where Tom has been holding the why of all this, I want to spend my half on the how, on what the hybrid he describes actually looks like when you are the one who has to build it.

The plumbing underneath the page

If you have ever sat and built a website properly, not just made it look nice but actually built it so that it holds together, then you already know that a page is never only the thing the visitor sees. Underneath the colours and the images and the words arranged on the screen, there is a second version of the same page that almost no human ever really looks at. There is structured data, little labelled notes in the markup that say this is the price, this is the author, this is the date, this is the review, and here is how many stars it got. There is JSON sitting in the background, describing the page in a way that is clean and predictable and easy for software to read. And none of this is particularly new to anyone who builds for the web, because we have been doing it for years, mostly so that search engines could understand our pages well enough to rank them, and most visitors have never had any idea it was there.

To make that a little less abstract, it helps to picture what one of those hidden notes actually looks like in practice. If I have written an article, I might tuck a small block of structured data into the page, written in a format called JSON-LD, which is really just a tidy way of listing plain facts so that a machine can read them without having to guess. In ordinary words, the block says something like, this thing is an article, its headline is this, the person who wrote it is this, it was published on this date, and it belongs to this larger publication. None of that changes a single pixel of what you see on the screen, and you could read the article perfectly well without ever knowing the block was there. But a machine that lands on the page no longer has to work out who the author is by hunting around the layout and hoping it has guessed correctly, because you have simply told it, in a vocabulary that thousands of other sites use in exactly the same way. That shared vocabulary is what people mean when they talk about schema, and the whole point of it is that meaning stops being something a machine has to reconstruct and becomes something you have stated plainly.

What is changing now is the kind of reader that layer is starting to serve. There is a proposed convention that appeared back in 2024, suggested by Jeremy Howard, who is one of the people behind Answer.AI, and it is called llms.txt. The idea is almost touchingly simple. You place a plain markdown file at the root of your website, the same way we have placed a robots.txt file there for decades, and in it you lay out, in clean and readable text, the parts of your site you actually want a language model to read. No clutter, no menus, no scripts, no advertising, just the meaning, served plainly.

And because it is only markdown, building one is genuinely something you could finish in an afternoon, which is part of why it interests me so much. You open a plain text file, you name it llms.txt, and you place it at the very root of your site so that it sits at a predictable address the way robots.txt always has. At the top you write the name of the site and a sentence or two describing what it is and who it is for. Then you write a short list of links to the pages that actually matter, your best writing, your core explanations, your reference material, and after each link you add a handful of words saying what a reader will find there. That is more or less the whole thing. If you want to go a step further there is a fuller version, often kept as a second file, where instead of only pointing at your important pages you include the full cleaned up text of them, so that a model has the real content in front of it rather than just a map showing where the content lives. Either way, what you are really doing is curating. You are deciding, on purpose and in advance, what you would want a machine to understand about your work if it only ever saw the tidy version and never visited the site at all.

I want to be honest about what it is and what it is not, because it would be easy to oversell it. It is not an official standard, and Howard himself has said as much. The big AI systems do not reliably read it yet, and by now more than one fairly large study has looked at the question and found that adding the file does not measurably change how often a model mentions you, with one analysis of around three hundred thousand sites finding essentially no difference at all. Google has even said, fairly plainly, that it has no plans to support it. And yet hundreds of thousands of sites have already added one, including a few names you would recognise, and people who have watched the web for a long time keep comparing it to the early days of schema markup, back when that too looked like a niche curiosity that later turned out to matter a great deal.

And this is where I want to put the practical heart of it, because it would be easy to read everything above and imagine that building Tom’s hybrid means building two entire websites, one warm and human and one stripped bare for the machines, two of everything and twice the work. You can do that, and for certain things you genuinely should, but for most of a site the truth turned out to be stranger and a good deal kinder than that. If you have already built the human layer properly, with markup that is clean and honest about what each thing is, with real headings and real buttons and images that are actually described, then you have already built most of the machine layer without ever thinking of it that way. What you add on top of that is thin. A little structured data to state plainly what the important things on the page are, and an llms.txt file at the root to hand a model the tidy version of what you most want it to read. That is the bulk of the work, and almost none of it is a second website. It is mostly just the first website.

Where the two layers do genuinely come apart is in the place Tom pointed to, the large stores of pure information, the white papers and the raw data and the long reference material that exist mainly to be read rather than to be experienced. For that kind of thing it really does make sense to build a separate and lighter layer, plain pages or plain markdown with almost no presentation wrapped around them, so that a crawler can read them cheaply and a person who actually wants the underlying detail can still reach it without having to wade through it on the main site. So when I try to picture the hybrid in concrete terms, it is not two parallel websites standing side by side at all. It is one human site built well enough that it serves the machines almost for free, sitting next to a small and efficient archive for the heavy reference material that nobody really wanted dressed up in the first place.

And this is the moment I really wanted to reach, because when you sit with all of this at once, you start to notice something a little strange, and a little hard to name. The future Tom was describing, the website that is one thing for people and another thing for machines, is in some sense already half built. We just never called it that. We built the human layer because we cared about people, and we built the machine layer because we wanted to be found, and now that machine layer is slowly turning into the thing that reads our work on the reader’s behalf. It is a bit like discovering that a path you have been clearing and maintaining for years leads somewhere you never expected it to go.

When accessibility starts serving the machine

There is one corner of all this that I have not been able to stop thinking about since my call with Tom, and it has to do with accessibility. For most of my career, the work of making a website accessible has been understood as work we do for people. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which most of us just call WCAG and which are looked after by the people at the W3C, exist so that someone who cannot see the screen, or cannot use a mouse, or who processes information differently, can still move through a website and understand it. In practice, when we talk about meeting those guidelines, we usually mean building to a level they call AA, which most teams treat as the realistic target, and the work of getting there is made up of a hundred small and very ordinary decisions. You write alternative text that genuinely describes what an image shows rather than leaving it empty. You use headings in a real order instead of choosing them for how big they happen to look on the screen.

You label the fields in a form so that it is clear what each one is asking for. You make sure every part of the page can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, and that the text has enough contrast against its background to be read by someone whose eyes are tired or beginning to fail. None of it is glamorous, and almost none of it ever shows up in a screenshot, but it is the difference between a site a person can actually use and one that closes its door to them. Here in Europe that work has recently stopped being optional in a lot of cases, because the European Accessibility Act came into force in the summer of 2025 and now expects a great many digital products and services to meet exactly these guidelines. So accessibility has been on a lot of minds lately, and rightly so.

But here is the part that feels strange to me. The whole craft of accessibility has always been, underneath everything else, the craft of making meaning explicit. You write your markup so that a screen reader, which is itself a machine, can correctly understand what is a heading and what is a button and what an image is actually showing. You describe things in plain words so that software can relay them faithfully to a person who needs them in some other form. In other words, we have spent years and years learning to make our websites legible to a machine, because a machine was the thing standing between our content and the human who needed it. We just thought of that machine as an assistant working on behalf of a person, which it was.

And once you see it laid out like that, the overlap with everything I was describing earlier stops feeling like a coincidence and starts to look almost like the same task wearing two different faces. The alternative text you wrote for a blind visitor is meaning made explicit, and a language model wants that exact thing. The heading you marked up honestly so that a screen reader could announce it is structure made explicit, and a model trying to make sense of your page wants that too. The form field you labelled, the button you named properly, the landmark you added so that someone could skip straight to the main content, every one of those is intent stated plainly rather than left to be guessed, and plainly stated intent is precisely what this new reader is hungry for. Which means that in very practical terms, if you build a site to that AA level for the people who actually need it, you have quietly built a large part of your machine layer at the very same time, and the two reasons for doing the work, the human one and the technical one, turn out to be pointing in the same direction.

Now another kind of machine is arriving, the language model, and it turns out that much of the work we did to make the web kinder to people has also, almost by accident, made it more readable to this new reader. The structure, the explicit labels, the meaning made plain, all of the things we built for the person using assistive technology turn out to be more or less exactly the things a language model also wants. I find that both hopeful and slightly unsettling, and I do not think I am supposed to resolve which one it is. It is hopeful because it might mean that good, accessible, carefully made websites are simply ready for this new era without anyone having to compromise anything. And it is unsettling because there is something odd about realising that work you did for the most human of reasons also serves something that is not human at all.

And then it opens a question I genuinely do not know the answer to. If a language model can read the raw, structured meaning of a page and then reshape it into whatever form a particular person needs, spoken aloud, simplified, translated, slowed down, made calmer, then it is at least possible that AI becomes a better companion for people with accessibility needs than many of the tools we have today. The same shift could even help companies that have never been able to afford a genuinely good, accessible experience, because the model sitting in front of their content could, in principle, give their visitors a kinder journey than their own budget ever allowed. I want to hold that possibility gently rather than promise it, because we have all heard a great many promises about what AI is supposedly going to fix. But I would be lying if I said the thought did not move me a little, that the very thing reshaping the web might also, if we are careful and a bit lucky, make it gentler toward the people it has so often left behind.

AI as a search tool

I want to slow down here, because there is a worry underneath all of this that I have been turning over for a long while, and I am wary of how I say it, because it would be very easy to make it sound like I am complaining about the way people read now, and that is not what I mean at all.

At my job we have spent time talking with young people about how they find things out, and one of those conversations has stayed with me. A teenager said, more or less, that AI made the person lazy, that when something can simply be handed to the person, the person loses the urge to go and chase the answer. I want to be careful and call this what it honestly is, which is one young person being candid in one conversation, not a study and not a verdict. But it landed on something I had been feeling for a while without quite having the words for it. Because if the answer can be had instantly, without arriving anywhere at all, then a certain kind of journey simply stops happening. Not the journey through a checkout or a menu, but the one where you go looking for something, and you end up somewhere you did not plan to be, and you leave a little changed by having been there.

For a long time I think we treated that journey as part of the value of the web, even though we never wrote it down anywhere or put it in a proposal to a client. You arrived at a site, you read more than you came for, you understood the people behind it, you caught their tone of voice, you felt that there was a person or a team or a belief on the other side of the screen. That was never really about the information. The information was almost the excuse for the visit. And my worry is not that people have become lazy, but that we are building a version of the web where that kind of arrival is no longer necessary, at least for everything that can be reduced to a quick answer. I do not think that is the whole web, and I do not think it has to be a tragedy. But I think it is worth noticing what we might be letting go of while we are busy admiring everything we are gaining.

And I notice, sitting here at the practical end of all this, that my worry is really the shadow of Tom’s hope. He is hopeful that we will build places worth coming to, websites so rich and so genuinely worth the visit that people choose to arrive even when a machine could have spared them the trip. I share that hope, more than I probably let on. But the thing I keep turning over, down here where the pages actually get made, is whether the arriving itself is quietly being designed out of the web, and whether all the craft in the world can pull someone back to a place they no longer have any reason to go.

The questions I cannot put down

So I find myself ending more or less where Tom began, holding a handful of questions rather than answers, which I have come to think is the honest place to stand.

Are we still designing for people, or are we slowly becoming translators, standing in between humans and machines, trying to serve both at once without fully belonging to either? When a language model has already read everything on the page before the person ever arrives, what is the visit itself actually for, and what is left inside it that still matters? And if the model becomes the thing that shapes how our work is understood, I find myself wondering whether it might end up building better journeys through that work than we do, and whether, a little further down the same road, we will still need the style guides and the UX designers and the graphic content, or whether those become a luxury rather than a default.

I wonder too about the places that exist almost entirely to be read; the Wikipedias and the reference sites and the great open stores of knowledge, and whether they will one day be built in a wholly different way, written first as plain markdown for the machines rather than dressed up in markup for us.

I am not sure either, when it really comes to it, whether companies will simply hand the whole customer journey over to the AI sitting in front of their content, having decided that a more accessible and more helpful experience, delivered by a machine, is worth more to them than the elaborate one they once paid so much to design. And if plain text is becoming the shared layer that the machines hand out for free to anyone who asks, then what becomes the thing worth keeping precious, the thing we still make slowly and by hand precisely because it cannot simply be read out by something else and passed along? I do not have clean answers to any of these, and I am not sure I trust anyone who says they do.

What I do know is that the question Tom opened with, whether we are still designing for humans, is not really a question with a yes or a no waiting at the end of it. It is more like a question we are going to be living inside of for the next several years, whether we choose to or not.

This series has been giving a behind the scenes look at the Wholegrain team and how we operate. In our final article I’m talking to one of our Project Managers (PMs), Havana about our approach to client and working relationships. 

We start our conversation with Havana raving about a Demon Copperhead, a recent hit at her book club, “I absolutely loved it“. Her current read, The Sleepwalkers is less highbrow but more fun. I ask her if she’s spreadsheet tracking ratings and comments about the books they read in the club. There is one and she’s in charge of it. Project managers gonna project manage. 

As you might glean from this, Havana is a PM through and through. As her LinkedIn profile says, she’s adept at “Leading Cross-Functional Teams from Discovery to Launch”. She’s been working facilitating projects since she graduated. Initially she worked in the charitable housing sector and latterly for creative agencies. Havana talks fondly about her colleagues she’s worked with. It’s often the people she works with that give her the most inspiration. Theory, technique and frameworks are important but people, experience and collaboration trump that.

The people at Wholegrain are one of the things Havana talks most passionately about during our conversation. It’s the most tight knit and aligned company she’s ever worked for. We agree that Wholegrain’s innovative “blind” recruitment process must be working. 

The cohesion and connection in the team makes Havana’s life easier. She’s happy to leave the glamorous work (design and coding) to others in the team. Her role is managing the creative element more than contributing to it. To facilitate this she works to foster a collaborative and transparent working environment for client and agency alike.

Maintaining client relationships 

This internal alignment helps projects run smoothly but that’s not the only factor at play here. I ask Havana how her experience helps things run smoothly on the client side. She tells me that her experience at a not-for-profit housing association was a great foundation. Working there meant she saw first hand the structural issues and internal stresses the charity sector has to navigate. There are complexities and expectations that differ from corporate organisations. 

Most relevant to her role with Wholegrain is the experience of working in organisations with small teams and little excess capacity. People are often wearing multiple hats, with a diverse set of responsibilities. As charities and not-for-profits tend to run lean personnel wise, they sometimes need more time to consider ideas and digest discussions. 

Wholegrain’s clients are all purpose driven and meet our ethical screening criteria, but come from diverse sectors with different financing and structures.

Does working with a spectrum of organisations present a challenge to Havana and her PM colleagues? 

According to Havana the key to meeting this challenge is in building close relationships with all the clients you work with. It can require a lot of code switching during the week. You might go from a meeting with a smaller not-for-profit, straight into a call with a larger corporate client. Time pressures for these organisations can be different. A corporate with a higher budget might move more quickly, while at a charity the time pressure is internal. Smaller organisations might need more breathing space to carve out time to allow them to make the best decision.

Regardless of the type of client, a close relationship is nothing if you’re not delivering what you promise. Havana has to be pragmatic when considering timelines and deliverables. It’s not always possible to deliver the right solution straight away. This doesn’t mean you can’t meet a client deadline. But it does mean carefully managing client requirements with internal capacity. It’s a balancing act but one that Havana and Wholegrain are very adept at. 

Client and agency in harmony

I ask Havana what this looks like when it works best? She cites one of her larger clients, The International Association of Public Transport (UITP). She’s been working with them for the past two years, initially on a site build and then maintaining ongoing improvements and additional projects. Havana has facilitated a relationship between her contacts at UITP and the Wholegrain team that is both harmonious and effective.

It allows the agency and client to work collaboratively to continuously improve multiple sites.  This ensures that the user experience meets their audience needs in a performant, accessible and low carbon way. 

Humane Web and Project Management

This example of accessibility and sustainability brings us nicely to Havana’s role in building Humane Web sites. She comes back to the idea of the account and project management teams working as facilitators. Humane Web standards are generally researched, maintained and improved up by the UX, design and development teams. The proof is in the popularity, engagement and performance metrics that our sites attain . The alignment and trust she has with the agency as a whole means she can take the ideas and justification into her daily work. 

I ask if our approach can sometimes cause tension with clients? Our way of working is different from other agencies, being more holistic and sustainability focussed. In Havana’s experience tensions can arise but they tend to be short lived. Transparency and open communication smoothes the way.  

For new site builds, clients tend to be more open to low carbon solutions. After all, they’re clear on our vision, mission and process because of Bailey, Chris and anyone else in the proposal process More often the challenges arise with retainer clients where we are maintaining and improving an existing site. The vast majority of the time all that is required is an open conversation, backed by our experience, metrics and proof of concept, to persuade people that a Humane Web is right for them and their users. 

This user focus is a key part of our Humane Web Principles and what makes it popular with clients. As Tommy discussed in our last article, rather than looking for a specific functionality, Havana and the team will try to understand what the specific user need is for the site. With that defined we can now propose optimised, accessible, light weight solutions that meet user needs and improve site performance. 

In Havana’s experience, once clients see the benefits first hand, they are sold. Alignment is locked in and a more Humane Web approach becomes second nature. She knows it’s working when clients ask for advice rather than a specific solution. They want to collaborate to find the best choice for users. 

Falling down the Humane Web and Digital Sustainability rabbit hole

Learning about digital sustainability has been an eye opening experience for Havana. It wasn’t something at the core of her work in the past so there has been a lot to take in. Performance and optimisation have always been something to strive for in digital projects but adding the sustainability element takes it to the next level. Like most of the team, she finds it almost impossible not to run sites she finds through Website Carbon. She says she finds herself boring, sorry, educating friends and family when the topic of websites comes up. I know the feeling. 

I follow up questions about digital sustainability with the inescapable topic of AI. I view the subject through a sustainability and ethical lens but appreciate that this is different from how most approach the technology.

Like many in the agency, her approach has been considered. Where she’s found it works for her is by using tools like Granola to help with taking notes at meetings. In particular, a summarised transcript of technical discussions can be really helpful to aid research and understanding from her non-technical background. But she’s found the tools lacking where a human touch is required. Drafting documents or emails often feels like it lacks nuance. She wants her communication to be human and genuine and hasn’t found that GenAI can recreate this. 

Buying into purposeful business practices

As we wrap up, I wonder if working for a BCorp like Wholegrain has changed the way her perceptions about how businesses could operate. As with our digital sustainability approach, the agency’s working practices have been eye opening too. She’s found that her sustainable and ethical behaviours have been amplified by her time at Wholegrain. Internal policies like our vegetarian food policy have a knock on impact on your whole diet in a positive way. Working with engaged, purpose driven clients brings new perspectives and insights. She tells me she’s found herself engaging with ethical brands as a first port of call without realising the change. Looking for a BCorp aligned approach becomes second nature. 

I ask what aspects of Wholegrain’s approach she’d like to see more widely adopted. For her, it’s how digital accessibility is considered from the very start. Once you see what should happen it’s hard not to notice sites that don’t take this approach. Once you understand you start to see inaccessible colour schemes wherever they arise. 

December will mark three years of working at Wholegrain. To finish our conversation, I ask what Havana is most proud of in her time here. Her first instinct is to mention how she has built strong client relationships. Wholegrain encourages solid, open relationships with clients. For her it makes work more human and fun but also more effective. Better working relationships make for better, more user friendly sites. She then reflects on what she has brought to the team. Early on she saw opportunities to improve the process and structures for our Continuous Improvement clients. Her ideas, including each client having a workbook that provides a single source of truth for client and agency alike, has strengthened our working practices. 

If you’re working with Havana, you’re in extremely good hands. 

If you’d like this type of relationship during a site build or retainer relationship, get in touch with our Growth Manager, Bailey to discuss how Wholegrain could help you and your organisation.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Smashing’s “Meets Sustainability” event, alongside fellow speakers Chris Adams and Ines Akrap. Videos of all talks and the Q&A are available to watch online, but in this article, I want to provide a written version of my talk, One Small Step for Web Kind.

My hope for this article is to communicate the key message of my talk, which is this:

The title of my talk echoes Neil Armstrong’s famous words when stepping onto the surface of the moon, and it felt fitting for a talk given at a time when the scale of the digital sustainability problem has apparently transcended Earth. With Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space, and even on the moon itself.

It would be easy to throw our hands in the air and say “I give up,” but I hope to inspire you to believe that our hope and actions matter now more than ever. To explain why, let me travel back in time to the beginning of my own journey in web sustainability.

From small beginnings

When I started Wholegrain with my wife Vineeta in 2007, we had a mission to use our business for good and we put sustainability at the heart of everything that we did, from the way that we worked, to the supplies that we purchased, to how we traveled, and to the types of clients that we worked with, but despite our best intentions, that wasn’t actually everything.

It was only in 2016 when we were preparing to certify as a B Corp that I realised that we had a huge blind spot. The B Corp assessment asked us how we measure the environmental impact of the products that we make, and furthermore, how we reduce that impact. Having previously specialised in the eco-design of physical products, I knew exactly what this question meant, as I had done exactly this type of assessment and design in the past, but I had always assumed that digital products didn’t have an environmental impact. They were “virtual” and living in a “cloud.” Weren’t they?

When I read these questions in the B Corp assessment, it quickly dawned on me how ignorant I had been, and to be honest, I was really embarrassed. Of all people, I had the experience to know better.

This realisation kick-started a mission that has since been at the center of Wholegrain, to understand the impact of the web, and to figure out what we can do about it. At that early time, searching online, the number of people who I found talking about this topic could be counted on one hand, such as Tim Frick, Mike Gifford, and James Christie. True pioneers out there in the wilderness.

I also found a lone academic paper on the subject, reporting the total emissions of the internet to be 2% of all global emissions, equivalent to the aviation industry. This was a startling statistic. There was very little information, and very few people talking about it, but it was a start, and it inspired me to go further.

That starting point led me to develop the first methodology for calculating the emissions of a single website, so that we could benchmark our work and find ways to improve. It led our team to then look at their own work in a new light and begin to evolve their approaches to design, development, content, and hosting, and we began to share what we were learning through talks, tools like WebsiteCarbon.com, collaborations like the Sustainable Web Manifesto, and content such as blog posts, our Curiously Green newsletter, and in 2021 my first book, Sustainable Web Design.

At first, most people were skeptical, believing that the digital world doesn’t impact the physical world. But slowly, slowly, people began to engage with the topic. And those people who engaged with the topic went on to make changes in their own work, speak to their colleagues, write their own articles, give talks, develop new tools, and even write books.

Skip forward to today and while the AI race may have made some people feel that the digital sustainability challenge is now too big to solve, we should stop and look at how far we have come. In an industry that claims to be forward thinking, digital sustainability was not on the agenda 10 years ago, apart from those few pioneers speaking into the seemingly endless void. Now, in 2026 there is a significant level of awareness of the impacts of digital technology, not just in the industry, but even in the general public. There are a growing number of events, podcasts, blogs, and tools, not to mention that a global standard for web sustainability is well on its way to fruition thanks to this ever-growing community of passionate people. On top of that, every day that I log into LinkedIn, I see someone with “digital sustainability” or “sustainable web design” in their profile or their company description. The culture has changed radically in 10 years, and this is thanks to every single person who stopped to take notice and cared enough to do something, however small.

It all matters, and every small action does matter, however imperfect it might be. If you optimise your email newsletter or switch to EcoSend, that one action scales to thousands of emails every time you send a message. If you optimise your website, that impact scales over thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of visitors, and if you slow down your use of AI, you slow down the AI race just a little bit. Furthermore, when we talk about the things that matter, sharing knowledge and ideas, we multiply our impact further, having a ripple effect that extends out to horizons that we will never see, but will likely be greater than the direct impact that we can see.

Seth Godin says that culture is simply the phenomenon that “people like us do things like this,” and I believe that in this spirit we can change the culture simply by daring to do things differently in line with our own values. We may face resistance at first, but gradually we disrupt the flow of the status quo to the point that the culture in our teams, in our organisations, in our industries, and society at large, begins to change.

My friend Nick Whitnell often likes to quote Buckminster Fuller, who loved to illustrate this with the analogy of a ship. Huge ships have immense momentum and are almost impossible to turn. The forces resisting them from turning are so great that it’s almost impossible to even turn the rudder, let alone the ship itself. To overcome this problem, ships have a tiny extra rudder attached to their main rudder, called a trim tab. This trim tab is small enough that it can be moved in the water, and when it does so, it creates a small pocket of low pressure that slowly moves the big rudder. And as the big rudder then moves, gradually the whole ship changes direction.

We may feel small and insignificant, but we are all the trim tabs of our society, quietly creating pressure to turn the seemingly unstoppable ship that we are all on, if we choose to. We just need to dare to stick our little oar out into the oncoming flow of water and trust that in time we are helping to steer the ship.

So with that, I hope that I’ve inspired you to believe that we all do matter, that the future hasn’t been written yet, and that we should get up each day and do our best to represent a version of the world that we want to live in, knowing that how we show up today shapes the world that we step into tomorrow.

Over recent months I’ve been speaking to various members of the team about how Wholegrain builds Humane Web experiences for our clients. Our MD Chris discussed how the agency is pushing the boundaries for ethical and sustainable web design. Bailey shone light on how we enable sustainable digital transformation. Tod showed how we put users first through our Discovery process. Chânelle talked about the joyful challenge of designing Humane websites.

This next conversation is with one of our senior developers. Tommy is our Technical Delivery Lead overseeing our coding standards, tech stack and much more.

This ended up being a more open ended conversation than some of the others in the series. At times it felt like a meditation on web development and coding, a calm and insightful conversation all at once.

Balance and board games

Our call started with me jealously coveting some Tintin wall art in the background of his office. It becomes clear that the simple artistic style of Herge’s comics offer an insight into who Tommy is. The analog nature of the books reflects his habit of getting away from the screen and technology as much as possible outside of work. Within the agency Tommy is renowned as a lover of board games. This sense of fun and competition translates well into inclusive and occasionally daft games to play on staff nights out. 

Tommy’s deep foundations with WordPress started 12 years ago in a tiny office in Worcester. At the time he was working with it as a user rather than a developer. Over time he started looking for coding solutions to solve challenges. The shift to WordPress developer began in earnest. In the intervening years a mixture of training, WordPress community participation, hands on experience and conference appearances have honed Tommy’s technical and problem solving skills to become a vital part of our developer team.

Today his experience and technical expertise make him the perfect fit for his role as Technical Delivery Lead. Internally he oversees the core codebase of our proprietary theme, owns the team tools and services and creates the process documentation that helps our team work smoothly. 

On the client work side he works closely with our Head of Experience, Tod on finding the right technical solutions for large, complex projects. His experience means he can be called upon for tricky tech support questions from clients and the dev team. 

Craftsmanship in coding

When Tommy talks about his work, the theme of craftsmanship comes up over and over again. He has a passion for making our sites as efficient, effective and robust as possible. While others in the team focus more on design and features, Tommy is busy ensuring our code base is crafted with care, attention and longevity in mind. 

Does this feel restrictive I wonder? 

A little perhaps, but Tommy views any constraints as a good thing, a structure to work within. He sees issues arising from adopting the latest CSS features. Wholegrain is in the business of building sites that have few barriers to entry. This includes technical barriers, where older devices or browsers can’t support the latest features reliably.Using a tool like Can I use to check how widely supported a new HTML or CSS feature is allows us to strike the right balance. Broadly speaking these features should be almost universally supported, but there is always room to manoeuvre given likely audiences and site intentions.

This brings us to another of the key themes I take from the conversation, balance. His “analogue” pastimes balance his technical, digital work. At work he pushes the agency to find balance in our output. This search has users at its main focus and means balancing usability, accessibility, sustainability and creativity. 

Does this impact how creative Wholegrain can be?

Not especially, particularly in light of Wholegrain’s sustainable and user focussed approach. In Tommy’s view, questions about how creative to be should always take into account a user’s needs. We should always be asking “what are you trying to solve”. Meeting user requirements is rarely a question of using the latest tech.

Respect your users and they will reward you

The best Wholegrain sites showcase our creativity without sacrificing usability and respect a user’s attention.  I ask if he has a favourite project where these elements come together. Operation Smile comes readily to mind. Wholegrain worked to improve their donation journey, which in Tommy’s words, was very nerdy work. 

The combination of complex coding and integrations, lots of important and open conversations and a worthy cause represents the best of what Wholegrain does. The end results were impactful too, resulting in a 141% increase in conversions, a reduced exit rate and most importantly a 161% increase in online donations. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Craft, efficiency and attention to detail is something that Tommy brings to our digital sustainability consulting projects. He loves helping to bring Wholegrain’s pedigree and experience to other organisations. 

Ever since Tom pioneered sustainable web development we’ve been building an institutional understanding of the issue. What seems obvious to our team is anything but obvious to other organisations. There is a joy in sharing our knowledge and watching understanding grow and behaviours change. Not only that but it’s a way of exploring issues away from our day to day or regular client base. 

It’s a learning experience for everyone involved and each project evolves our understanding. 

I’ve been asking other members of the team what aspect of Wholegrain’s working methods other agencies should adopt. His experiences of delving into some horribly tangled code bases informs his response. Developers should respect the craft of coding when it comes to creating websites. Choose quality over the cutting edge (or vibe coding).

This belief reflects his thoughts on AI coding too. Generative code, produced without a sense of craft or background in coding, is unlikely to meet Tommy’s strict standards when it comes to efficiency, simplicity or accessibility. Coupled to this, you’ve got to know who you are building a site for. 

There can be a massive difference between a site that will make your C-suite happy and a site that meets your user’s needs. AI’s tendency to support and reinforce your prompt rather than push back could exacerbate this problem. 

As you can see Tommy is the perfect person to set the standards for our sites. If you’d like a site crafted specifically for your users, people and planet, get in touch with Bailey to discuss a project.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

I’ve been really excited to talk to Wholegrain’s Growth Manager, Bailey as part of our series introducing you to key members of our team. She is a true digital sustainability disciple and brings an energy and eclectic set of influences and ideas to all she does. Her role at the agency includes vetting potential new clients, pitching for projects, managing client projects and relationships as well as working to knit together our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. 

I start our conversation asking about her inspirations. Typically she mentions a wide range of influences. Gardening features heavily in our initial discussions but otherwise a couple of newsletters stand out to me as illustrative. Creative Destruction and Dense Discovery are beautifully curated emails that aim to find connections and sense in an increasingly “noisy” world. They are inherently curious, pragmatic and realistic but also look to find joy and optimism where it can be found. All of these adjectives are descriptions I’d apply to Bailey too. 

Collaboration and BCorp alliances FTW

Connection and collaboration are key themes for Bailey. She is a keen advocate of the BCorp Agency Alliance. Her enthusiasm about the alignment she finds in this group, as well as a push towards collaborating for the greater good is infectious. While in other circumstances you might find agencies jostling for position, here there is a view that the collective is stronger when ethically driven agencies collaborate together. 

When I talk about her role at Wholegrain (WG), I put it to her that she could be seen as a bit of a protector of WG. Ethical screening and client and project alignment is of vital importance to how WG operates. Given that part of her role is to run prospective projects through the ethical screen policy does she see herself as a gatekeeper? 

She doesn’t quite agree with the characterization. It’s about calling aligned clients in, not blocking them out. Ethical screening is part of the picture but in reality it’s about spotting mutually beneficial relationships. You have to ask “can Wholegrain’s approach benefit a prospective client”? Will there be the right amount of synergy between client and agency to make things a roaring success? 

She points out that energy and effort in the team is not infinite. We have a holistic approach that benefits both clients and the Wholegrain team and we can’t do our best work if we’re overstretched. So Bailey sees part of her work as ensuring that those efforts are focussed on the right clients and the right projects. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Some of the most exciting projects Bailey has won for the agency recently are for our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. Bailey tends to bring a positive energy to calls and meetings but when I start to discuss the transformation projects in the pipeline, this energy kicks up a notch (or three). 

Digital sustainability (DS) is what brought Bailey to Wholegrain. She describes when she first learned about the topic as being like a smack in the face. Our daily lives are digital and when you learn about the amount of energy and infrastructure that enables this you can’t help but be shocked. The scale can be mind blowing.

She cites emails as a powerful illustration.

• In 2025 approximately 376 billion emails were sent and received daily. That’s one hundred thirty-seven trillion two hundred forty billion (137,240,000,000,000) annually. 
• EcoSend estimates that this equates to an annual carbon footprint of 300 million tons CO₂ from emails worldwide.

There is a finite amount of energy that we can expend as a species and remain within safe planetary boundaries. But when your contribution to the problem remains almost infinitesimally small compared to the whole, what can you do? It can be hard to find a starting point to make improvements. As with so many sustainability issues it’s a case of starting small. Like many, Bailey discovered the Website Carbon tool at the start of her journey and it inspired her to greater action. 

The open sharing of knowledge that Website Carbon represents was an inspiration to Bailey. This transparency forms the cornerstone of her approach to DS and Sustainable Digital Transformation. But transparency and knowledge are nothing without positive action. “Like much of sustainability, DS is not a checkbox exercise. It’s a journey to better governance and behaviours”. 

Moving beyond carbon emissions

In many ways Bailey’s journey mirrors Wholegrain’s. Website Carbon represents a starting point, a way of benchmarking, with energy use and CO2e estimates as a metric. But at the core of Sustainable Digital Transformation is the concept of the Humane Web which moves things beyond carbon emissions.  

“CO2 has been the metric for so long but it’s a starting point.” It doesn’t take into account things like climate justice. “Climate change is unequally damaging”. While we in the global north benefit from access to digital services, the harm this causes is often visited on the global south. Issues like E-waste processing, low paid data tagging, arduous and dehumanising content moderation, resource extraction and climate change are all issues felt more keenly in developing nations. At the same time those nations can suffer from low data zones meaning a lack of access and lack of digital benefits. 

Our transformation services aim to take a more global view. Low cost digital platforms and storage have often created messy digital estates. As Bailey puts it “expansion without architecture is chaos”. As with the newsletters Bailey loves, you need to take a holistic view and look for connections, positivity, optimisation and solutions. This leads to asking questions like:

• How do your digital platforms fit together? 
• How do you improve usability for all? 
• How do you bake sustainability and accessibility into your projects from the start? 
• How do you facilitate digital decisions being made quickly, both internally and externally? 

Paradoxes and misconceptions 

From the outside it might seem paradoxical that the creators or Website Carbon are moving away from CO2e as the key element for digital sustainability. Bailey argues that it shows the field is maturing. After years of measuring, benchmarking and considering the sources of digital emissions, she sees Wholegrain as having the experience and mindset required to move the conversation and field forwards. 

I ask if Bailey sees any misconceptions around Wholegrain and the work we do. If there are any, they’re around how the web design process should happen. Too many agencies offer ungrounded designs that over-promise on their capabilities but end up under delivering.

The misconception is that it’s possible to create a fit purpose design without carrying out an effective exploratory discovery process. The findings from the process feed into our iterative design process. All of this allows us to deliver strong designs that not only look great but also work for you and your audience in the short, medium and long term.

Alignment is key here too. When Bailey lands work for clients who are completely aligned in purpose, mission and direction, the results are outstanding.

I ask what this alignment looks like in practice and Bailey cites one of the first projects she brought on board at Wholegrain, Environment Bank. From the very start of the process, there was total alignment, trust and collaboration. With both sides trusting the process and some award winning branding to work with, the result is a site that matches their aims. It’s handsome, robust and supports the work they do. 

Bailey points out that this idea of robustness highlights another misconception around Wholegrain and our process. We won’t only build a site that looks good but also one that is long lived, secure and maintainable. We sometimes inherit sites that look good on the front end but are messy to update and manage at the back end. Cutting corners and moving too quickly at the outset of a project can add technical debt and hugely increase the lifetime cost of a website, or necessitate a full rebuild. 

Why, why, why?

I remind Bailey that she is nearly two years into her time here and ask her what she’s learnt since joining the agency. “Asking why is more important than how or when”. To Bailey’s mind many of the issues we’ve discussed come up because not enough people ask about “the why”. If you don’t know “the why”, you can’t accurately answer how something needs to happen or when it could be finished. 

I can’t leave the conversation without asking about AI, a topic I know she has strong thoughts on. “Tech should enable our lives and not be a destination where we spend our lives”. Much of the AI discourse seems to be about integrating technology into every element of our lives. It’s not clear if the benefits outweigh the costs, be they financial, environmental or societal. If AI lives up to the hype, then maybe the benefits will outweigh the costs after all. 

She appreciates Wholegrain’s considered approach to the technology, pragmatically using solutions where appropriate. Integrating Holp onto the UKGBC site is one such example. Much of Wholegrain’s work is about making things as efficient as possible, so users can find answers and spend their time elsewhere afterwards, while minimising the impact at the same time. Weighing up the pros and cons of a service like Holp allows us to do that.

Ultimately, the evolution of DS and Wholegrain means that our digital experiences are meeting human needs. Our services and working practices can offer inspiration to others. We continue to show that you can put your users first while respecting and protecting the planet and humanity as a whole.

If you’ve been considering making your site more tailored to your community and mission, Bailey is all ears!

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

So far in this series I’ve spoken to Tod about our Discovery process and Chânelle about Designing for a Humane Web. Both these pieces give an insight into the processes the agency follows. But in this piece we’ll look at the bigger picture and talk to our MD Chris about how he is guiding Wholegrain. It’s nearly 3 years since Chris took over the day to day running of Wholegrain from founders Tom and Vineeta. It’s been a time of internal change but the direction has remained steadfast – building websites (and by extension a web) that are better for people and planet.

This article will give a better idea of what inspires and influences Chris, his thoughts on the sustainability space and his vision for the future of Wholegrain

Inspiration

I kick off our chat by asking what influences Chris both personally and professionally. I already know he’s one of the B Community’s foremost experts on vegan hot spots so I steer clear of this topic as it might derail my research. Chris describes himself as a serial hobbyist. “If it’s creative and something you can learn, I’m pretty much going to say yes – from pottery to sewing to painting, I’m happy using my hands to make something.” Having previously seen Chris’s incredible hand made backpack this definitely rings true. 

More surprising is a keen interest in Architecture. Chris is careful to stress that he’s got no idea of the names of buildings or even architects involved. For him it’s “about the impact space, light or form can have on you as a person”. When faced with a difficult project or decision he’ll often take these thoughts to different buildings or spaces. The simple act of changing your surroundings can be a great way of unsticking an issue. “It’s so interesting how something like a building, that is fundamentally about shelter and survival, can also provide creativity and emotion.” 

I’m keen to find out a little about his professional inspirations too. He comes alive when describing the creative services offered by Nice and Serious. “To me, they were a driving force behind what I think of when it comes to creativity for good.”. He’s reverent about the lack of ego and self promotion in their work and I hear echoes of what Wholegrain does best when he talks about “quality, creative work that is for the people who need it”. 

Dispelling the myth that BCorps only celebrate other BCorps, he also mentions the work Reuben Turner is doing at Rewild. He’s taken with the “gorgeous simplicity to how he approaches creativity” and the humanity of his work. Nowhere is this humanity more apparent than on his Five Things page. The distillation of Rewild’s philosophy into five simple pillars is something I see in Chris’s approach too, as well as the treatise that “Allies always win”. 

As a leader of a celebrated agency I’m interested in other organisations that Chris looks to for leadership and operational ideas. He highlights humanity as being incredibly important to him and it’s a theme that we will revisit over and over again in our conversation. Chris looks for organisations outside of the agency and BCorp bubbles to find people that live and breathe their values on a micro and macro level.

He highlights Hearth as an example. The Wholegrain team recently visited this social enterprise community bakery in Hackney. They “operate in such a circular way that when you see it, you can’t help but be inspired. The impact that individual people can have on the fundamental needs of others and the planet is really inspiring. I want that to be something I distill into Wholegrain.”

Wholegrain and the Humane Web

Humanity has always been important within Wholegrain and how we operate on a day to day basis. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the pioneering work done on Sustainable Web Design. It’s an oft repeated line but our founder Tom, literally wrote the book on the subject. Under Chris’s leadership, Wholegrain has been evolving. Sustainability is still a key but our operations and philosophy are becoming more holistic. Enter the concept of the Humane Web. 

As Chris puts it:

“For a long time Wholegrain has been at the forefront of digital sustainability but we also know that alone is not enough. The reality is that the internet needs far more nuance than just making it sustainable from a technical point of view – it should work for every person that needs it, wherever they are and however they access it. A Humane Web is the defined vision of that thought and it perfectly sums up how Wholegrain has evolved its ways of working over the past couple of years.”

The Humane Web concept is changing Wholegrain on a technical, operational and foundational level.

“Its changed the shape of our business and led to creating roles within our team that focus on experience design and technical delivery alongside the more traditional agency roles to design and build websites. It goes past the idea of ‘user centric’ and instead builds websites that enable users to define what that even means for them individually as they engage with your site – as an example, it leads us to consider users who want exploration and fact gathering in order to convert with equal weight to those who want quick conversion. 

Self paced, accessible both in terms of design and data and high performance built in, are key to everything we do.”

Low weight, highly performant, robustly coded and accessible Wordpress sites remain at the core of everything we do as an agency. We’ll be committed to building low carbon websites as long as we operate. But this evolving approach has allowed us to look beyond websites to be able to offer something more transformative. 

“We have crafted and defined a new service offering that stitches the work we do together across accessibility, sustainability and data inequality for organisations to go past just their website and consider the impact of their entire digital estate. Sustainable Digital Transformation is the best way to evolve and future proof everything digital in your organisation. 

It’s a really exciting evolution of what Wholegrain can do to further the mission of a Humane Web.”

I suggest that this approach might be seen to be at odds with the actions of the big tech firms that shape the way we browse and live online in today’s society. Invasive data gathering and massive data centre growth pushes on regardless of the societal and environmental costs they reap. 

How does he navigate that tension?

“The tension is definitely there but so is the simple fact that a more humane website is a better performing website in all areas. I hold that front and centre whenever we hit that tension because I don’t think there is any brief or hurdle that I’ve seen that can’t be solved with it. If you want to increase performance, a sustainable site does that. If you want increased conversion rates, robust experience design will deliver that. 



We can’t change big tech but we can show organisations and individuals that there is another, greener, fairer, more effective way.”

Inevitably Generative AI sneaks into the conversation at this point. I ask what one word springs to mind when Chris thinks of AI. After a moment’s thought, he settles on “regressive”. It’s not the technology itself that feels regressive rather the models the platforms are based on. 

“Any model, in any area of life, that is based on mass data input and then making decisions based on averages – feels regressive.” This belief has played a part in Wholegrain taking a cautious approach to AI adoption. As with any digital agency, it’s a constant presence in client and technical discussions. For the time being Chris doesn’t see this approach changing. 

Never say never though. 

“As we get further clarity on the benefits and negatives, there is definitely room for a more sympathetic and considered way of using AI and Wholegrain will follow that path.”

The bigger picture

Anyone who works in, or adjacent to the sustainability and purpose driven “sectors” will recognise that the past few years have been tough. The push back against environmental protections and equality by the Trump regime has sent unwanted ripples across the world. Charities and sustainability focussed organisations have suffered. Chris and others in Wholegrain’s leadership have worked tirelessly to protect the agency and team against this backdrop. 

More positively it looks like there are green shoots of recovery starting to become visible. The successes of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Hannah Spencer for the Green Party in Gorton and Denton have provided succour. Their successful campaigns have also marked a shift in sustainability messaging. Equality and quality of life are the core messages with sustainability an important but less explicit policy point. It’s something Chris and I have discussed a lot recently. 

I ask what organisations like Wholegrain could learn from this shift in approach and messaging. 

“Whilst Wholegrain has always led in digital sustainability, there is a legacy and baggage that comes with the word ‘sustainability’. That realisation runs parallel to a second, which is that in the world as it exists in 2026, what’s important is humanity. We see that with the evolution of the Green Parties core messaging and we will start to see that with Wholegrain evolution over the year ahead as we start to position ourselves more authentically to the agency we are now.” 

As I start to wrap up the conversation I ask what aspect of Wholegrains’ ethos he’d like to see other organisations and competitors adopt. Again, humanity is a key influence. 

“Short wins don’t benefit like long term impact does. I struggle to see why that wouldn’t be something that doesn’t steer your approach when it so clearly benefits the quality of your output, the impact of digital on the environment, the experience of the user and the clients ability to meet their goals.”

Additionally there is sometimes a lack of true authenticity in the “business for good” sector. Conversations with prospective clients in the sustainability space can be frustrating. “The amount of purpose or impact driven organisations that don’t live the same values in their digital space when the benefits are so undeniable on all levels.”.

As we often say in our presentations, digital is physical. You can’t separate your online and offline actions and decisions and policies when it comes to equality and sustainability. There is an idea that story telling and impact on a website comes from autoplay videos and heavyweight javascript powered features. Performance and environmental impact be damned. 

For my final question I keep things nice and easy.

What’s the thing that Chris is most proud of in his first 3 years at Wholegrain?

After mildly berating me for the question he considers and settles on “resilience”. As I mentioned earlier the past few years (most of Chris’s time in charge in fact) haven’t been made any easier by external factors. 

“Wholegrain has a legacy that was definitely heavy to carry when I first started and as a sector, agencies have not had an easy few years, but we are still here, still innovating and still moving the needle on what a purpose led business in our space can do. I’m proud of that.”  

For me, the most important thing innovative and ethical businesses and organisations can do is continue doing what they are doing. They have to keep carrying the torch and inspiring others to do better. With Chris at the helm, the Humane Web as a guiding light and resilience as a core tenet, Wholegrain looks well set to do just that. 


You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

*Author’s note. In early drafts of this article I used phrases like “flesh out” or “adding meat to the bones” which are wildly inappropriate for our proudly plant powered MD. I briefly thought about using “adding pulses to the salad” but it didn’t quite land. If you’ve got plant based metaphors to use in place of carnivorous ones, drop me an email…

In our last article we discovered the Wholegrain Discovery process. Tod explained how the process helps align our projects and identify Experience Principles. But when the Discovery phase is over and we’ve identified these principles, what’s next? 

This is when our UI/UX designer Chânelle gets involved and her design magic brings things to life. When I think about her a few things spring readily to mind.  

• The holder of the unofficial title for “most desirable interior design in the background of video calls” at Wholegrain
• A “Ghost Sign” enthusiast
• A fount of NeilsonNorman knowledge
• A taker of (too?) many photos while travelling

But most importantly for this article she’s Wholegrains’ design lead. Since 2020 Chânelle has been helping craft sites with users and the planet in mind.

I chatted with Chânelle about her influences, process and where she takes design inspiration from. 

If you’re lucky enough to be a Wholegrain client you’ll have seen her sorcery in action. If you’re not yet a Wholegrain client, read on to find out why you should be… 

About Chânelle

I kicked things off by asking how she would describe the sites she designs for Wholegrain’s. After a moment’s pause she settles on “clean and considered”. It’s a great summation of our diverse portfolio. Clean design with users considered above all else. Chânelle is on a mission to help create sites that endure and work for all users. 

She explains that there are layouts, patterns and conventions that just work for websites. They allow users to find information quickly. If you can use these conventions it allows you to be creative elsewhere, without sacrificing usability.

Design Inspiration

If the devil is in the detail, where does she find inspiration for those details? As you’d expect from an experienced designer, her inspiration comes from far and wide. Magazines, blogs, her travels, mid-century design and of course websites of all shapes and sizes. 

Regular visits to places like Awwwards means Chânelle is on top of the latest trends in web design. I find this interesting because like most of the team at Wholegrain, if I see a site I like on Awwwards, the first thing I do is check out its carbon score on Website Carbon. More often than not, they are cutting edge but have poor performance scores.

As it turns out Chânelle does the same! What she looks for are features that might work for our clients. From there she works with our developers to see if it’s possible to reverse engineer them with lower weight code. Cutting edge features with lower carbon scores. 

Away from the flashy stuff, places like SiteInspire, LowwwwCarbon and intriguingly, Brutalist Websites feature in her bookmarks on her browser. When she tells me this I have to pause our chat to check out the Brutalist site as Chânelle watches on. She’s smiling as I scroll because hardly any of the site designs are appropriate for any of our client’s sites!

She explains that she likes that the nature of these sites lets the content do the talking and often in a low weight way. Even if the aesthetic isn’t appropriate, the design language can be and looking at these sites provides useful touchstones for her designs.

Designing for a Humane Web in practice

As you’d expect for Wholegrain, Chanelle’s designs have accessibility, usability and sustainability built in from the very beginning. So knowing a bit more about where her inspiration comes from, I’m keen to understand how she uses her years of experience to create designs that fit with our Humane Web approach. 

“Sites should be designed with all users in mind,” she says.

That means 

• Working to AA WCAG standards as a minimum
• Colour combos are verified and changed if required. (Clients can sometimes change their brand guidelines to be more accessible because of this)  
• Fonts chosen for legibility rather than following a trend 
• Important information and hierarchy are prioritised to allow users to easily navigate the sites

Encouragingly, accessibility recommendations are the most readily accepted by clients.

And what of designing with the planet in mind? What measures does Chânelle employ to keep the weight of a site down? 

For her it’s all about pragmatism coupled with sustainable design knowledge. The lowest page weight possible for each use case or user journey is the right approach. Optimising and minimising is more important than the lowest overall weight. 

A donation journey is a good example.  Including heavier elements, such as videos, animations or images often makes for a more engaging and effective experience. Increased engagement equates to maximised donations for important causes. Sacrificing fundraising for increased lower carbon scores isn’t justifiable. Minimising the carbon score for the right features is. 

A close relationship with the dev team is important here. There’s no point in designing a feature that isn’t possible within the low weight methodology that Wholegrain is so proud of. 

And what about client relationships? A Humane Web approach means that corners can’t be cut. On the face of it, it might seem that simple, effective designs are easier to create. In reality the opposite is true. There’s nowhere to hide for these types of designs. Information has to be readily available, not obfuscated by vertical scrolling and distracting transitions. Explaining design decisions in this context relies on buy in from clients and clear communication from our side. 

In Chânelle’s experience there is a difference between what the design and development community vote for on site showcases and what users actually want. A lot of the heavier features you see on showcases like Awwwards are not actually very popular with users.

Usability takes precedence over flashy features. 

The Humane Web approach in action

2026 looks likely to see this Humane Web approach really take flight. Tantalisingly some of the design work that Chânelle is most excited about is just over the horizon. When I ask what we should be looking forward to she mentions some client sites that are currently in development and a rebranded suite of Wholegrain sites that should launch later this year. I’ve seen some of these designs and agree that they’re pushing the boundaries of what a “sustainable website” looks like.  

Watch this space for some beautifully usable and accessible sites launching in 2026.  They are going to show the industry what a better web can look like for all of us.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

When I wrote about curating web content in my last article the concept of Discovery kept coming up. It’s a vital part of what makes Wholegrain’s projects successful isn’t something we talk about all that often. Given its importance I sat down with our Head of Experience Design Tod Khanian to learn more about the process, how he has evolved the agency’s approach and what it means in the context of the Humane Web.

So what is it?

Neilson Norman summarises it as:

Tod puts it more simply. To him “Discovery is figuring out what the audience and organisational needs are for a website and then translating those needs into how a website looks, how it’s structured and how it works.”

Simplicity and efficacy are watch words where Tod is concerned. In the two years Tod has been at Wholegrain he’s been working to improve the solid foundations he found when he joined the agency. He’s worked with the team to formalise a process that provides balanced, human focussed, actionable outputs that our talented team can use to build successful websites.

Essentially, clients always come with ideas about how a site should work and the goals it should help achieve. The Discovery phase helps flesh out what was contained in the brief and identify anything that might be missing. It provides the data points required to confirm the project parameters. At the end of the process it provides guidance that helps the Studio transform an organisation’s requirements into a beautiful, human friendly website. It provides insights into site maps, taxonomy, structure and also Experience Principles, which we’ll return to later. 

Who gets involved?

As you might expect, Tod is the lead on all our Discovery processes. Who else is involved depends on the type, complexity and budget of the project. For simple builds, such as a brochure type site, Tod will lead a precise information gathering phase. In this case you could expect a workshop to define objectives and touch points as well as goals for how the site will support the organisation.

As projects become more complex, more input is required. It may seem counter intuitive but a simplified UX journey could mean a much more complicated back end. Where this is the case our Tech Leads will collaborate with Tod and the client to discuss APIs, integrations and cutting edge site components. The experience our Development teams bring means that the correct solutions are found but also identifies where compromise, either budgetary or technological, may be required.

On the client side, who we speak to depends once again on the budget and type of project. Discovery for smaller projects can often be undertaken with a single knowledgeable stakeholder. For larger projects, multiple workshops may take place, user interviews conducted and industry focussed research projects undertaken.  

What does our Discovery process look like?

All together now:

“it depends on the project!”

No two Discovery phases are the same, just as no two websites are the same. Even so our Discovery phases all follow similar lines no matter the budget or size of the project. They are based on confirming the organisational and therefore website objectives. These are agreed at the start of the process. From there the watchwords are collaboration and iteration. We collaborate internally and with client stakeholders to focus on the core goals of the site. We work iteratively to ensure that everyone on the project is comfortable with the progress and agree with the direction and findings.  

Larger projects mean longer information gathering phases. Our most in-depth discovery phases can have larger budgets than whole site builds. Where we are involved in multiphase development projects the discovery phase can last months. Stakeholder availability and long term planning can be key. Tod reiterated that Discovery is a vital investment for a successful project.

The more time spent defining site goals and user and project requirements at the beginning of a project nearly always results in a better end product. This is especially important when the project is part of a long relationship between client and Studio.

Most recently this has been true for our work with the International Association of Public Transport (UITP). When redesigning and rebuilding their website the discovery process allowed us to understand the needs of the variety of stakeholders who engage with the organisation. Through the Discovery process we were able to collaborate in a two pronged approach to helping users find the right information more easily. On the Wholegrain side we created an intuitive and simple to use site with a bespoke search UI and improved internal taxonomy. On the UITP side they used the findings to help update and refresh content, allowing for improved findability and relevancy across their content library.

The result? Through our efficient and human centered approach UITP were able“to break down the corporate structure and better highlight the wide variety of knowledge, events and advocacy content available for our users.”

You can read more about the work we carried out with UITP here.

What is the output?

As with any web agency we’re looking for elements that form the foundations of a website:

• Site maps 
• Taxonomy
• Page structure 
• Key user journeys 
• Core components 
• Site features

But because we’re not just any agency we look for some additional key insights from the Discovery process.  In line with our Humane Web principles we take a more human centred approach. Based on our research, findings and discussions we define a set of Experience Principles for our builds. These aren’t technical or design based. They are a set of statements that provide a framework for the project team to work within.

Some principles come from our beliefs as an ethical and sustainability focussed agency and apply to all our sites: 

• The site will be accessible and inclusive – built to AA WCAG 2.2 standards
• The site will be light weight and energy efficient in line with sustainable web design principles
• The site will be intuitive to use and easy to navigate

Others will be project or site specific. For example:

• A new site for Wholegrain should “reflect the joy and positivity our BCorp status represents”. 
• A site for Extinction Rebellion should “reflect the urgency of the climate crisis”

These Experience Principles are what allow us to get right to the heart of any project. They allow us to see things in a different way. Sites that initially look like they have the same user experience challenges as any other site in their sector are shown to be anything but. For instance, a flashy, cutting edge design that mimics a competitor in the field might not work for your audience if they are older or less tech savvy.

Whatever the project, these Experience Principles are prompts that our Studio team can refer back to to keep things on track, designers, developers and project managers alike. Equally importantly our clients can use them as anchor points when discussing our work at various project milestones. 

Wrapping up

As you can see, the Discovery phase is a hugely integral part of all Wholegrain’s projects. It allows all stakeholders in a project, both internal and external to align and drive things forwards. With Tod on board our process is simple, yet sophisticated and provides technological solutions to human problems.

If your organisation is planning a new site build or wants to improve an existing site, get in touch with Bailey to see how our agency can help.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

One of the most tantalising prospects of the internet is having the sum total of human knowledge just a couple of clicks away. The challenge is narrowing down all the options to find the relevant information you need.

If you’ve grown up in parallel with the internet as I have, you’ll have seen numerous ways of meeting this challenge. From narrow but reliable options like Encarta, to early search engines offering a glimpse into the wider world, to algorithms offering personalisation to nascent AI driven services and drivers, all are attempting the same thing; fast, relevant curation of information. 

A challenge for membership platforms

For specialist membership platforms and content driven organisations this is an acute challenge. Audiences demand relevant, up to date and engaging content that cuts through the noise of the internet. Platforms need to find commercially viable ways of providing this type of content through subscriptions and premium tiers. Not only that, in a world of AI generated content and a challenging attention economy they also face challenges such as:

• Whether to have a narrow or wide content focus? 
• How to effectively curate content?  
• How to stay relevant and engaging?

At Wholegrain we collaborate with our clients to help meet this challenge head on. Let’s dig a little deeper into the issue and then explore some of the solutions.

Curation methods

Content rarely arrives on CD-ROMs nowadays and curation takes a wide array of forms. For membership platforms we see three broad curation methodologies that work effectively:

Human driven curation on a specific topic

Organisations with a specialist focus provide trusted sources of expertise across the web. There are numerous examples but in a Wholegrain article it seems relevant to choose two that are close to our hearts.

Our client, Carbon Brief is a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy. Their site provides a wealth of well written, data rich content on a range of climate topics. Their daily briefing emails provide comprehensive breakdowns of the latest climate news. 

Our own Curiously Green newsletter does the same thing. We pull together the latest news, resources and regulations relating to the humane web and digital sustainability, sending regular emails to our subscribers. 

Human driven curation that pulls together narrative threads

A favourite newsletter among the Wholegrain Team is Dense Discovery. Described as “Thoughtfully curated links from a noisy web” it doesn’t focus on any particular topic. Rather it does an incredible job of tying together disparate topics and elements in a pleasing alchemy. We often end up seeing things that aren’t usually part of our algorithms and we’re generally glad to see them. It’s a hard trick to pull off and needs an open minded reader to work effectively.

Away from the digital world, I thought of William Gibson’s Blue Ant series of novels here too. They weave popular culture, technology, fashion and global politics into coherent and connected narratives. Curation can be artful as well as commercial. 

Machine driven curation

You can split this into two broad sub categories, algorithmic and of course AI driven.

Algorithmic curation comes from machine learning based on user habits. Analysing user behaviour reveals patterns and connections allowing related and relevant recommendations to be made. Spotify springs to mind here. Its recommendation algorithm can provide a comfortable, familiar set of recommendations and playlists based on your listening habits, but informed by behaviours across the user base.

On the AI side of things I find a platform called Finchling an intriguing prospect. Describing itself as “Intelligent media monitoring” that “helps brands, comms & PR teams find press opportunities, and monitor what competitors are getting coverage for”. It pulls together relevant information for your organization and prioritizes risk and opportunity.  

Challenges and opportunities in content curation

The obvious opportunity here is that you can add value and retain an audience if you are providing information that is relevant to them. On the commercial side you can provide invaluable service within a sector. It can build brand authority and reputation as well as offering monetisation avenues. From a more holistic point of view you can share vital and important information with a wider audience, encouraging behaviour change. 

But there are challenges to doing content curation well too. If you make your focus too narrow users could lose the opportunity to make unexpected discoveries and links across topics. However, if you spread yourself too thin you risk losing relevance among your audience. 

I came back to Spotify here. As time went on I found that its algorithm became less effective. I was listening to less new music as my feed became more and more homogenous. It was frustratingly difficult to break new musical ground. I switched to Deezer and have found it does a better job but still not perfectly. Ultimately I find myself going to places like Six Music’s playlists to find new music. It’s curated by people with (I assume) similar music tastes to mine and an openness to new acts and genres. It’s doing what I found an algorithm could not.

Balancing access and gate keeping 

A particular challenge in the new media landscape is allowing access to your content while paying the bills. Paywalls can be vital for organisations but can put off digital natives who are used to free access. Adding value to your user base and providing exclusive info while keeping your casual audience engaged is a tricky balancing act. I find that 404 Media threads this needle quite well. Their articles are great and free to access for the most part. But the reporting they provide is niche enough to have a loyal, paying audience who see the value in the stories they tell.

Solving the problem with Humane Web Principles

Whatever methodology is most relevant to your organization, it won’t work effectively without a well thought out application or website to back it up. At Wholegrain we are guided by our Humane Web Principles when approaching these challenges. We build with the human in mind crafting self-paced online experiences for diverse needs. Curation is nothing without design choices that empowers audiences.

At the core of this is the Discovery Process. To make the right design choices and streamline curation workflows you have to answer certain questions. You need to know your audience and whether they want a narrow or wide focus to remain engaged. Are they only interested in a specific topic or are they open to being introduced to related areas by experts they trust?

Discovery always illuminates internal factors. It helps identify the key curators within a team and help enable them to effectively use the back end of a website. Interviews and discussions help identify the themes and content types within an organisation’s digital estate as well as how best to showcase them.

It can also help find tech solutions to help streamline workflows. Can analytics help identify what your audience resonates with? Can AI bring something to the party? Regardless of the tech side, it’s the humans in the process that provide the secret sauce. Why should someone subscribe to a membership service or newsletter if there isn’t human oversight taking time to organise and curate your information?

Wrapping up

Curation done well requires knowing your audience and an in-depth knowledge of the topics you are curating. The innate understanding of the topic comes from your experience and expertise and this, in turn, gives some insight into your audience too. However to really get to know your audience and their needs requires something more; discovery and iteration.

Taking time to confirm your understanding of your audience and their requirements is a must. The way we engage with our audience evolves over time along with their needs.

Testing, checking, and creating opportunities for growth from audience led insights. Reach out to our team if you would like to know more.

10 years of BCorp UK – 10! 

In some ways 2015 feels like forever ago but also, yesterday. To get us in the mindset of 2015 – think rose gold everything, selfie sticks being a constant hazard, the word Brexit wasn’t in our lexicon and Adele dropped “Hello” (living rent free in our minds ever since!).

While 10 years seems like a lifetime, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t a BCorp. The ethos behind the movement has always been at the core of what we do. Our founders’ original vision in 2007 was to create a better web for a better future. Ethical screening has been part of our business since 2009. What B Lab UK did is solidify that we are not alone in conducting our business with purpose. It pulled like-minded organisations together, creating community and fostering positive growth. Most importantly it created frameworks for others who didn’t know where to start.

Having certified in 2017, we have grown up alongside B Lab UK with many fun collaborations! The B Impact Assessment was a catalyst for our growth and gave us something to continually hold ourselves accountable too.

Let’s Take 10 to reflect on where we started and what we’re fired up about for the future!

• In 2015 we introduced a no-fly policy.
• In 2017, we were part of the 2nd cohorts of BCorp in the UK and launched the first version of the Website Carbon Calculator.
• Joined 1% for the Planet in 2018 to date, supporting organisations like International Rivers, B Lab UK, Business Declares, The Green Web Foundation, Eden Project, Surfers Against Sewage, Solar Aid, Catalyse Change, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, COAST, and Re-Action Collective.
• We released the Sustainable Web Manifesto and co-created the Sustainable Web Design Guidelines with MightyBytes.
• In 2021, we worked with B Lab UK to build the Better Business Act website.
• We only went and won a B Corp Best For The World accolade for Governance in 2022.
• A true mark of growing up – in 2023 Tom & Vineeta graduated to Founders roles and brought in a Senior Leadership team that not only maintains Wholegrain’s values but builds on them.
• We attended the largest gathering of BCorps in Oxford September 2024, a monumental moment packing out the whole city for 2 days!
• 2024 was a big year! Employee-led benefits were introduced and we took ethical screening to the next level by becoming Clean Creatives.
• Finally in 2025, we launched the 4th version of Website Carbon Calculator! 

We’re very proud of the past, but honestly, reflecting on the last 10 years did fire us up for the future! Particularly for:

• Seeing the Better Business Act become a legal requirement in the UK with an amended Section 172 of the Companies Act. You can pledge your business today on their website (designed & developed by us!).
• Evolving people’s knowledge of digital sustainability from benchmarking to Human Web Principles. In a world where we can generate anything, how can we take a step back to create self-paced online experiences that are adaptable? We do have more on this to share with you..
• Our team! With the introduction of non-bias recruitment, strong flexible working policies and employee led benefits – we are seeing incredible talent enquire to be part of our team. They aren’t hindered by location or stuffy CVs, we are prioritising the human behind the talent so they feel supported to do their best work possible.

This is our impact but there are over 2,600+ other BCorps in the UK alone.  Each and every organisation has  grown in the last 10 years spreading a network of purpose and positivity. We are driving the business world to a more impactful future. 

Take the time to see who in your network is a BCorp and where they’re demonstrating how powerful it is to lead your organisation with people, planet and purpose at the forefront.

#10YearsOfUKBCorps

We are obviously a WordPress agency but that decision wasn’t made lightly or without considering all of the options. If you’re reading this it probably means that you’re interested in WordPress, worried about its security levels (don’t believe the press, its secure!) or we’ve linked you here.

Either way, welcome! Lets get started…

01. Trusted & Secure

It’s incredibly easy to make WordPress secure, mainly because the core is so well maintained and patched so the addition of hosting and domain encryption or SSL certification adds to the security. You may have heard the not so pleasant hype that WordPress isn’t secure but powering over 43% of the web, there is a reason WordPress is so well established and such a trusted platform. Based on its share of the internet, WordPress hacks are actually a lower proportionality. As with most CMS platforms, the security does also depend on maintenance and the actions of the developers / owners and so with Wholegrain’s Maintenance, that security is optimised for you.

02. Simplicity

It’s easy to build user friendly interface, making it easy for you and your team to on-board, update and edit your site. This level of control means your site won’t need a developer or expert to update it – saving time and budget! WordPress enables consistent, iterative and long-term growth, not a new site every few years – its that simple.

03. Scaleable growth

The WordPress framework makes it easy to create multiple websites under one umbrella, maintaining consistency of your brand whilst also enabling some great opportunities to grown your wider digital estate in a easy, logical way. Not only that, it can also handle everything from simple forms to e-commerce thanks to the use of a combination of out of the box and custom functionality. For Wholegrain, we have our own WrodPress theme that pushes this adaptability even further!

04. SEO friendly

WordPress not only comes with its own core SEO functions, but it’s also enables easy SEO best practice. At its foundation, WordPress is built using clean, structured code – which SEO loves! You can easily add custom permalinks and manage meta data to further feed your WordPress site to the search engines, which also help with your accessibility too. WordPress also enables fast loading and image compression with ease, making the site more sustainable and as we always say at Wholegrain – a sustainable site, is an SEO friendly site.

05. Open source

Meaning you own your own site, and have a community of expert knowledge to lean on and collaborate with. For us, this is a huge benefit and our team learn and grow form the community all of the time (and vice versa). There is a side effect of this too, which we don’t like to talk about, but should you ever decide to move away from Wholegrain, finding a developer to work on your site is also easy because of this open source nature.

06. Cost effective

This may be last on the list, but it has a big impact. Firstly, lets start with the lack of licensing fee for the core software and because it’s open source, its free to install – none of those nasty Drupal updates that cost a fortune every year. You will have read further up that WordPress has a large community behind it and this manifests plugins, themes and a professional network of developers meaning not everything needs to be from scratch and support is easy to find.

So WordPress is safe, cost effect, great for sustainability and SEO whilst also enabling some strong growth of your site. It’s easy to see why WordPress is Wholegrain’s platform of choice.

We recently launched version 4 of the Website Carbon Calculator, our free tool to help accelerate the shift toward a more sustainable Internet. We make this available because we can’t build or maintain every website in the world, that in itself isn’t sustainable! Tools like this help to contextualise website emissions to take steps on your own digital estates.

But the ones we do build? We make sure they’re sustainable as they grow.

We work with many people post launch, and after retesting our current client’s homepages and service pages, the average score was a ‘B’. 

A ‘B’ is a good score that indicates sustainable progress, but we’re never satisfied with ‘good enough’. We know it’s possible to reach an ‘A’, and that’s what we strive for. Websites should always be evolving toward better performance, in line with their business growth.

Where there’s growth, there can be bloat

Okay, I recognise that is not the sentence we all wanted to read – but it’s the truth! As businesses grow, there’s often an urge to add more to the website. It’s natural, but sometimes it leads to unnecessary bloat. And while adding more can feel like progress, it can hurt the site’s performance and impact the user experience.

We start builds with low-carbon, efficient code, but that’s just the beginning. The real goal is to make sure that every person interacting with the site has a meaningful, enriching experience. This is where education and collaboration come in. Together, we can make sustainable design choices that benefit both the planet and the people interacting – internally and externally.

A true balancing act! But it is possible; Humanitarian Practice Network is a shining example of displaying varied types of content without increasing its impact on the planet and giving a rich experience for a global audience.

Digital sustainability is not a one and done

We always aim for an ‘A’ score at site launch, but we need to think of websites as living things that need care and attention to stay healthy and high-performing. That’s where continuous iteration of the site is key and keeping Experience Principles front of mind.

With us by our client’s side, we design thoughtful solutions to business developments, campaigns and product launches – demonstrating to your audiences you care about all their interactions with you. We’re on a mission, and we want to bring you along with us! If an image upload is too big, don’t worry, we’ll help you fix it and share a tip or two with your team to prevent it in the future.

Long-term vision

We can’t improve what we don’t measure. Regularly benchmarking our websites helps keep sites in flow with new tools, user needs, and the ever-changing digital landscape – like AI. It’s important to us to be transparent about our own work too because digital sustainability is a journey, not a destination.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room – the impact of a ‘bad’ brief.

Writing a brief can seem really daunting – especially when you are not a designer or coder yourself. But trust us, it doesn’t need to be a huge document that strikes fear into your marketing team as they try to wrangle the countless wants, needs and opinions from the finance team, senior leadership, sales execs and your best friend who just doesn’t like the site.

Avoid the panic and keep it simple.

Don’t sweat the small stuff! Adding every possible goal, detail, want and desire will confuse and complicate the responses you get. Trust the agencies responding to do the creative thinking bit and instead focus in – why are you building a new site? That should give you the overall goal. Of course it needs to X and Y and Z along the way but don’t get too fixed on those because they are not your overall goal.

Identify your target audience and put them front and centre. It’s ok for one of the audience to be your company, but remember thats just one group and 99% of website are focussed on conversion of some kind and your team are already converted! It’s also worth noting here heirachy is incredibly important – you might have 10 user groups but the site can’t whistle and dance for all of them across all of their needs and neither should it. Some pre-work on who the main site audience is will really give you a great head start on the work.

Here’s where you shouldn’t got top line and the detail will really help. Specify essential features, functionalities and integrations. Provide any open source documentation on API’s too, that always helps in terms of gathering realistic numbers and not inflated ones because the agency just doesn’t know enough. This will also narrow the field of agencies really quickly for you and make sure you get a better steer on solutions because not all team can or want to work on all platforms and integrations.

Spoiler alert – agencies know you bend the truth when it comes to budgets. It’s a lot easier if both sides are open and honest so both teams are on one page straight away. This will save time and also build trust right out of the gate whilst also making sure that the agencies responding to your brief are being as realistic as possible about the ability to deliver within your budget and time.

We don’t need more carbon heavy, clunky and chunky websites on the internet. Adding “please detail how you will make our site low carbon and accessible please” into your brief will sort those who can from those who can’t and will result in you being delivered a new, sustainable, low carbon site that will look after you well into the future. You shouldn’t have to compromise on performance or impact so this one should be your default.

It’s as easy as that! Happy brief writing!

Wholegrain has a three part mission statement.

We aim to create the best websites in the world.

We use our business as a force for good.

We work to accelerate the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet.

This mission runs through our organisation like a stick of rock. Sometimes it’s a balancing act. At times we are focussed more on one element than another. 

Website Carbon as an Internet for Good accelerant

Website Carbon is one of the ways we aim to shift towards a better internet. Since its launch in August 2018 the tool has been used to test over 1 million individual webpages, for free. For many, using the tool has been a stepping stone into larger actions within digital sustainability. It certainly was for me and many of my colleagues at Wholegrain.

We take the stewardship of Website Carbon very seriously as a result. It means that making any changes to the site takes time and care. The last major update came in November 2023 when we added a rating system to the tool. The ratings give more context to the results and allow for better benchmarking.

Since then the calculator has remained stable but relatively untouched, until today.

A major update to Website Carbon Calculator

On the 14th July 2025 we updated the calculator to the V4 of the Sustainable Web Design Methodology (SWDM). V4 is the latest version of the model. The process of updating the calculator has been delicate and one we were keen to get right the first time. Any issues that erode trust in the estimates the tool provides need to be avoided.

After extensive testing Website Carbon is now updated. If you have a keen eye you might see some changes to the results it provides.

How are things different now?

V4 is a major update to the SWDM and things are quite different under it. 

For one thing you might notice that the estimate your website receives in V4 is lower than in V3. Sites tested using the V4 model tend to have lower carbon estimates per page view than V3. Estimates for your webpages may be up to two thirds lower than in V4.

Why are the estimates lower?

SWDM uses data transfer as the main proxy for estimating webpage energy use. The core calculation is the total energy used by the internet divided by the total data transfer on the internet. The updated sources used for V4 of the model saw that data transfer has increased two fold. However, total energy use has fallen.

Essentially the internet appears to be operating more efficiently than previously thought. 

If the internet is more efficient do my webpage results matter less?

Not at all!

Efficiencies in the network will only go so far. The total data transfer on the internet is increasing hugely. Growth in AI and data collection continues at an increasing pace. Efficient, lightweight websites are more important than ever.

Your website’s footprint might represent a tiny fraction of the internet’s overall emissions. But a more efficient website has huge benefits outside of carbon reduction. Lower carbon sites tend to be quicker to load and have better structure. Humans like this, search engines like this, they can lead to higher conversion rates and it’s better for the planet.

API access and API endpoint

When Website Carbon launched 7 years ago it was a pioneering tool. As part of our “improve the internet” remit we offered access to the Website Carbon API endpoint to a handful of users. From today that is no longer the case.

The main tool isn’t affected in any way, but it’s important to be transparent when we make changes like this. Any people or organisations materially affected by the change have already been contacted.

The digital sustainability landscape has changed significantly since 2018. Building a similar tool to Website Carbon is accessible. For instance The Green Web Foundation has an open-source JavaScript library CO2.js. with extensive documentation and support.

The change to API endpoint access isn’t one we have made lightly. Changing the way it can be accessed allows us to put our time and energy into other areas.

Watch this space for more details about where our energy is being redirected.

Wrapping up

We’re pioneers in the digital sustainability space and have a duty to the community to continually refine our offerings as knowledge and technology evolves. We’re on a mission, and we make our tools and resources publicly available so others can learn and help mobilise this mission.

If you have questions relating to Website Carbon you can reach out to our eat@wholegraindigital.com.

If you want to dig deeper into your website’s carbon footprint speak to bailey@wholegraindigital.com about our Digital Sustainability Consulting.

If you want further reading or to take more action you can subscribe to our Curiously Green Newsletter, visit the Sustainable Wed Design site or download the Digital Declutter toolkit.

Here’s to many more years of website testing.

“Googling” something is now common language in the same way that “Hoovering” has been since in the mid 20th century. While Hoovering still means to use a vacuum cleaner, the meaning of Googling is starting to change.

The market dominant search engine is currently morphing into an “answer engine“. Before, you would search for something on Google and then click a link to find information. Now Google and many other companies are encouraging users to find information without ever clicking a link. New services like AI Overviews are causing a growing number of Zero Click Searches causing organic traffic to fall in recent months.

But organic traffic isn’t just falling because of changes to Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Services like ChatGPT and Perplexity also appear to be partly responsible. They allow people to “search” for information without ever reaching the website source the information came from.

There are legitimate doubts of the accuracy of AI Overviews. There are also concerns over increased LLM hallucinations. Whether the information is accurate or not, how users find your site and how often people visit is changing. What we can do about it isn’t immediately obvious so we called on some experts to help. In this article Dave Peiris, head of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at Propellernet helps shed some light on what’s happening in SEO at the moment and how to navigate it.

Summary

• Robust, reliable, fast and performant sites remain the goal. All search engines currently prioritise such sites.
• Well structured, human focussed and authoritative content is still what people and search engines want.
• Where your site features on a results page is just as important as it ever was.
• Adapting content and pages towards more specific search terms could pay dividends.
• A diverse marketing and “discoverability” strategy is key in 2025
• Economic realities and backlashes against AI may yet have a role to play in search.
• Independent and non-commercial players could be disruptors in the near future.

Discoverability fundamentals

Let’s start with the basics.

While SERPs have changed, the fundamentals for technical SEO haven’t, particularly in the case of Google. Sites with strong technical foundations and good performance metrics are more likely to rank highly for organic search results and in AI summaries.

The view from Propellernet:

Position and rank on results pages remains important. Given that AI summaries appear at the top of the page, organisations are increasingly targeting these sections to maintain authority. High search rankings coupled with strong technical SEO helps here in two ways. Dave explains that Google’s AI overviews are partly based on the Gemini model but also grounded in organic search results. They use a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) which passes new, relevant information into the AI model before a response is generated.

Other platforms work slightly differently. Dave says that: 

There are many reasons for an organisation to try and opt out of Search Engines crawling their sites for AI summaries. Those trying to protect IP and content on ethical grounds aren’t penalised as such. Blocking Google’s AI crawlers but allowing Googlebot to facilitate page indexing, means you’ll still appear in organic search results. At present, this doesn’t appear to result in any punitive action or downgrading of search ranking across the major search engines.

Away from search, ChatGPT and other LLMs are slightly different propositions. Blocking access to them means they can’t use your information. You won’t appear in an answer and won’t therefore be cited. Whether this presents authoritative or traffic issues is not yet clear.

In essence, the game has changed but how you play it hasn’t. A site still needs to be written using clear markup and hierarchy, load quickly and contain useful pertinent information. 

Has discoverability strategy changed?

Yes and no.

As you’ll note from the advice above, many of the best practices on technical SEO remain. The difference is that it appears to be driving less traffic to sites. 

So what can we do to mitigate these changes?

One thing is to adapt to the new ways people are searching for information. Search is becoming more personalised and queries are becoming longer and more detailed. The example Dave gave me was about running shoes. He says:

This type of query might come from people using voice to speech features on devices. It might be from an AI deciding that’s the right query based on user data. Either way the specificity is the key.

For purpose driven organisations and businesses this might mean being more specific about your products and services. For Wholegrain it might mean we break down and describe the digital sustainability services we offer in a different way. Dave suggests that a “Best for” type section could help in the new model.

As an example our Website Carbon Audit might be described as “Best for large organisations looking to assess and reduce their website emissions“.

Our Digital Sustainability Workshops could be “Best for organisations asking “How can we reduce the environmental impact of our digital estate?” “.

This small change could prove useful for human users looking for solutions as well as “agentic” AI or LLMs.

“I think the days of pumping out huge amounts of content in order to appear in search results are on the decline”

There might be an interesting side effect from a digital degrowth point of view. This focus on specificity might mean a decline in pumping out huge levels of generic content. Dave advocates for diverse methods of brand and awareness building.  

The irony of so called digital solutions like LLMs is that it might see more efforts put towards human connectivity such as:

• In person events
• Newsletters
• Digital round tables and webinars
• Branded Discord servers or Sub-Reddits
• Digital PR

Synthetic content or dare I say it, slop, proliferates the modern internet. Building authentic connections with your audience has never been more important.

Speculation on the future of search and AI summaries

While AI and LLMs are everywhere, it’s worth considering what the future might look like. Many AI products feel like they are fishing around for a solid use case. There’s also a question of whether these businesses will ever reach viable profitability. I think we might see a limiting of free tier access and a ramping up of costs as VC firms seek returns on investment.

Under those circumstances there are some more philosophical questions to consider when it comes to strategy. I asked Dave how he felt about organisations blocking AI crawlers and opting out of the game (as far as is possible). He saw this as an ethical consideration. News Organisations and publishers in particular have issues with their content being used without explicit consent. The New York Times, for example, blocks GPTBot and Google-Extended from crawling their content.

There are budget implications to being open to AI crawling too. At Wholegrain we’ve seen charity sites experiencing huge amounts of bandwidth being used by AI crawlers. Going over band width quotas increases website hosting costs at a time when charities and not for profits are seeing funding squeezed. 

Ultimately you need to understand the implications of blocking AI crawlers from your site. Your competitors might not be as ethically minded (if you see this as an ethical question) and could steal a march on you. Alternatively an ethical stance of AI combined with a human approach to brand building could be highly effective.

The small matter of truth

The question of human truth and AI summaries also came up. Users often see search results that appear higher up the page as a source of truth or authority. We don’t know enough about how truthful users view AI overviews even when they contain inaccuracies. Users who are used to ignoring the sponsored ads at the top of the page might scroll to the organic results out of habit.

A potential backlash against the new search norms

Propellernet are taking pragmatic steps for themselves and their clients in the face of the new normal. But that doesn’t mean they can’t see an alternative future. Dave acknowledges that AI summaries on all search engines are incredibly divisive. On the one hand Google and others tell us that users are engaging with the overviews and use this as evidence of assent. But social media is full of anecdotes about AI slop and inaccurate LLM generated content. Any company going all in on new, AI heavy, user interfaces might be subject to a backlash.

A smaller player like Ecosia, DuckDuckGo might go back to what Dave describes as a “10 blue links approach”.

We might even see more independence in the search industry. Projects like OpenWebSearch.eu open the way for new players to gain traction with “ethical” search platforms. While they might not overtake Google,the possibility of more competition from more transparent sources feels like an important and hopeful one.

Wrapping up

So there we are. The search landscape is changing but in many ways the situation for businesses and organisations hasn’t changed at all that much. For all the billions of dollars invested in AI “winning” the SEO game still requires the same things. Solid fundamentals, authentic useful content and diversified channels for messaging and engaging with your audience.

Plus ça change, rien n’a changé.

Thanks to Propellernet for their invaluable input on this article.

Enormous thanks to Dave for his time and expertise in answering our questions and shedding light on the topic. Thanks too to Propellernet general manager Gill Sheen for facilitating things.

Propellernet is a team of search experts, storytellers and strategists, helping ambitious brands unlock value across performance and brand marketing. They are AI-enabled, human-led and propelled by purpose.

Since 2003, their mission has remained consistent: to hire great people, deliver outstanding work and enjoy the process along the way. A focus on innovation has driven the creation of tools such as AnswerThePublic, Blackbird, CoverageBook and Hidden Keywords.

At Wholegrain we spend a lot of time thinking about the environmental impact of our websites. Our designers create engaging, accessible layouts and craft planet and user friendly experiences. Our developers are continuously working to improve our efficient code bases. They push the envelope on what a low data website can deliver. Our project and account managers are on a mission to ensure that our clients (and their clients) get what they need in a way that is good for people and planet. The whole site from the back end to the front end is carefully considered and iterated on.

All our sites are tested on multiple browsers. They have high levels of backwards compatibility with older versions of Chrome, Safari and Firefox. At an agency level that’s normally where our consideration of browsers stops.

Recently though, I’ve been questioning my choices of tech platforms and software.

Out of all the programmes I use on a daily basis, a browser is what I spend the most time on. I’d never really thought about what browser I use or why. I hadn’t engaged with my choice from a sustainability point of view. This is strange because most of my working and personal life is spent doing just that. Curiosity got the better of me (which shouldn’t be a surprise given my job title) and I started investigating the question.

Pulling on the thread marked Chrome without unravelling my Google sweater

Much of this article is going to focus on Chrome and its alternatives. It is difficult to discuss Chrome without talking about Google as well. Google dominates browser market share in the same way that it dominates other online services:

• Search – First with a 91% market share
• Digital documents – First with a 50% market share
• Analytics – First with a 75%+ market share across different platforms
• Email – Second behind Apple with a 28% market share

Many of these products and services are widely used because they are free and default on devices. They are also used because they are good at what they do.

Google is a tech company but makes the majority of its income from advertising. Their dominance across multiple areas of the internet grants Google a monopolistic reach and influence over it. This access allows them to hoover up vast amounts of user data and intelligence through Chrome and other products. 

Myself and others see it as problematic.

Some of the others that share my opinion include the US Judiciary. Following an Antitrust ruling in August 2024, the US Department of Justice submitted a proposal stating that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome to reduce its monopolistic powers. 

In this article I will try to back up that proposal from a sustainability point of view. The intent is not to persuade you to cut Google out of your personal or professional life. Rather it is to help you make an informed decision about the environmental costs of your online activities.

Browsing the main browsers

With those caveats in place I’ll dig in.

Statistically speaking you are probably reading this article on Chrome or Safari. Google and Apple have huge dominance in the browser market. Worldwide Chrome takes 66% of browser market share, with Safari coming in second at 17.6%. Microsoft’s Edge browser trails way behind in third taking just over 5% of the market.

That means three giant tech firms are responsible for 90% of the browsers used globally. Does it matter that three companies hold the keys to how we interact with and consume content online? On an individual basis possibly not. Collectively though, especially in the case of Chrome, this dominance poses a problem for users and the environment. 

There are some obvious reasons why Chrome dominates the market. For a start, Android phones dominate the mobile market and Chrome comes as standard on them. More importantly, it works well. From a usability point of view it’s pretty solid. It’s got great developer tools and most sites are optimised for Chrome because of its dominance. It’s a rare, free, product that we use on a daily basis that works pretty much flawlessly.

It’s not just working flawlessly for its users. Google is benefitting hugely too. As the saying goes – “if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”. Chrome plays a vital part in Google making billions in profits from advertising. Essentially the browser is doing two things. Allowing users to access the internet and allowing Google to gather data for advertisers to use.

So what is this free product, used by approximately 3.67 billion people, actually costing us? In my opinion it costs us two interconnected things. As individuals it costs us a measure of privacy and agency in our browsing and consumption habits. 

In the context of digital sustainability, it extracts a cost that is paid by the planet.

The big data hoover

Much of what we do at Wholegrain aims to reduce the data transfer associated with browsing our clients web pages. We try to help others to do the same with tools like Website Carbon and through our writing.

In many ways Chrome is trying to do the opposite.

By some estimates, Google stores an additional 15 petabytes of data every day. If 15 petabyte doesn’t sound like much, understand that 1 petabyte is equivalent to:

• 500 billion pages of standard printed text
• or 200 million 5mb photos
• or 13.3 years worth of HD video content

They won’t run out of storage any time soon though. Google has an estimated 30 zettabytes (30 trillion gigabytes) of capacity in their (power, water and resource hungry) data centres. 

The data they collect from Chrome takes the form of a “digital fingerprint”. This is user data that can identify and target the individual habits of a Chrome user. They use seemingly benign data points like IP addresses, screen resolution, device settings etc to build up a picture of your habits and interests. This, along with data from a wealth of other sources is used to help make their advertising solutions so effective.

In effect we and our data is the product that Google extracts from Chrome.

Why is this bad?

Using the internet is an essential part of daily life. Even an aspiring neo-luddite like myself can’t deny that. Nor can I ignore the positive benefits that digital solutions bring to us all. But browsing doesn’t have to mean vast amounts of data being collected. It doesn’t have to be stored and analysed. The additional, hidden energy and environmental costs of this data collection are not essential to our daily lives.

This data gathering by Chrome plays a part in the data centre growth that has exploded in recent years. These huge data centres need power, water, space, minerals and resources. A browser which helps create a digital doppelganger has impacts in the real world.

The 2024 UN Digital Economy report states, “low-carbon and digital technologies largely compete for the same critical minerals”. Additional and extractive data collection plays a part in this. At a time when we need to decarbonise our grid as quickly as possible, big data centres are increasing energy demands from companies like Google, Microsoft and others. Renewable energy growth is struggling to keep up and we can’t afford the competition for resources.

Less tangibly these digital fingerprints are helping the global economy maintain a level of consumption that our planet cannot sustain. Humanity consumes vastly more resources than the earth has the bio-capacity to regenerate. To combat the climate crisis, the developed world needs to consume less. Being exposed to fewer and less targeted adverts would likely help reduce consumption.

It would be healthier on our bank balances, our psyches and the earth’s eco-systems. 

If Chrome isn’t so shiny, what are the alternatives?

If you would prefer a browsing experience without this hidden environmental cost, there are simple steps you can take. Making Chrome more privacy focussed is possible but is less effective than using an alternative privacy focussed browser. There are a number of options to do this including Brave and Vivaldi. Personally I’ve made the switch to Firefox as my main browser for a number of reasons.

1. Firstly it’s owned and maintained by a not for profit who are committed to building a fairer, safer internet. They want an internet “where our privacy is protected, AI is trustworthy and irresponsible tech companies are held accountable.” That sounds quite nice doesn’t it? Here’s their full Manifesto.
2. It’s a privacy first browser. It blocks trackers from the first time you install it by default. It also allows you to further enhance your online privacy if you wish. By contrast, Chrome tracks your browsing even in incognito windows.
3. Using Firefox means less data is collected and stored as I browse. This means less demand for data centres and less energy is required for my online actions.
4. Not only does using Firefox save energy use at a data centre level, there is evidence it does so at a device level too. Tests show that Firefox uses less electricity than Chrome, meaning lower browsing emissions.
5. Firefox is an open source project. This means that its source code can be scrutinised and improved by its users. A transparent and collaborative web is better and fairer for all its users.

Making the change

If you are persuaded by the arguments above, Mozilla has a handy guide for making the switch to Firefox. While I’ve been happy with the experience of using the new browser it isn’t perfect. There are some additional privacy tweaks you might want to make. More pertinently I have occasionally found that some website features, such as payment portals, haven’t worked when using Firefox. This can be temporarily frustrating, but firing up the page on Safari or Chrome fixes the issue.

This serves as a good reminder that you don’t have to jump to an alternative browser full time. You could keep using Chrome for work and switch to another browser, such as Firefox, for personal browsing. Any time spent browsing on something other than Chrome means less data collected and stored.

For the sake of the planet, we should all be striving for that.

Article update

If this article peaked your interest you can find out more on the topic in the interview I gave to Reset – Digital for Good. We discussed about the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google, browser choices, digital consumerism and much more.