Book Of Leaves Podcast
A low carbon website for an Irish podcast on Eco-friendly living.
Year: 2022
Project Overview
In 2019 Ceara Carney began podcasting from her home, interviewing people from all walks of life doing their bit for the planet. Each episode is an opportunity to learn from someone and take a leaf from their book on living more sustainably.
Ceara reached out to me to create a new, cleaner, and easier to navigate website to house her podcasts, as well as a little more information about herself and the work she does.
Deliverables
- Responsive & sustainable web design
- Sustainable/ accessible UX
- Podcast embeds
The Brief
Book of Leaves previous website would break anytime Ceara tried to update it herself. It was very plugin-heavy and hadn’t been updated in some time. There was no section for Ceara to add links or buttons for other channels to her podcast or for her Patron so she would have to copy/paste these on to each new episode post on her site. Not only was this time consuming but it was data consuming. Podcast embeds however were the main culprit for page weight.
Ceara’s brief was very simple – a tidy, modern site for her podcasts!
The Process & Solution
With Ceara’s concise instructions, I designed a more up to date site, utilising her logo and colours. Still keeping the site clean in terms of design I wanted to highlight Ceara’s fun personality and creativity so I included some small personalised illustrations for the feature section on the homepage.
The site was optimised for performance, minimising CSS and JavaScript, and lazy loading podcast embeds. This greatly improved speed and reduced page weight.
The end result is a faster, easier to edit and navigate site with a performance improvement of 90+%
6x
Times faster than previous site
0.24g
of CO2 per page view
99%
Lighthouse performance score
Kind Words from Book Of Leaves Podcast
Ceara Carney, Founder/Podcaster
“I host an eco-friendly podcast which had a very basic design with a huge carbon footprint. JR took the time to redesign the whole thing, even making new images for it, making the carbon footprint of it as low as possible, and all for a very reasonable price. She has helped me with any questions I’ve had since, and has even made some small upgrades to the site since designing it! So not only can she make your website look even better than how you request it, she’ll lower the impact it has on emissions as much as possible which is more important than ever.“