A SMALL WEBSITE
The Small File Media Festival asks filmmakers to make tiny movies, because online video carries a real and growing carbon cost. It would be strange to make that argument on a bloated website. So this site tries to practice what the festival preaches. It is built to be small, quiet, and light, and this page explains what that means and how it is done.
None of this is about deprivation. A small website can be fast, strange, and beautiful. The constraint is the fun part. What follows is a plain account of the choices behind this site, partly to keep ourselves honest, and partly because the how is genuinely interesting once you start paying attention to the weight of things.
WHY A WEBSITE HAS A FOOTPRINT
Every time you open a web page, your device asks a server somewhere for a pile of files, and those files travel across networks to reach you. Fonts, images, scripts, stylesheets, video. All of it is data, and moving data takes energy, at the data center, across the network, and on your own device as it does the work of drawing the page. The heavier the page, the more energy the whole chain burns.
Most of the modern web has quietly gotten enormous. The average web page now weighs several megabytes, much of it tracking scripts, oversized images, and code nobody strictly needs. It adds up. If the internet were a country, its emissions would rank among the largest in the world. A single small website will not change that, but it can refuse to add to the problem, and it can show that the lighter way still works.
WHAT WE DID
Here is the concrete list, roughly in order of how much weight each choice saves.
Tiny images, on purpose
Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page after video. Every image on this site is automatically shrunk and reduced to a small palette when the site is built. Photographs and posters become eight color dithered images. The stylized portraits reduce to just two colors, the same green and near black you see across the site. They are capped at a small size, smaller than they even display, because we do not mind them scaling up a little. The result is images measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes, with a grainy, low-bit look we happen to love.
No tracking, no analytics, no ads
This site sets no tracking cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no advertising. That is good for your privacy, and it is also good for weight, because tracking and advertising scripts are some of the heaviest and most numerous things on a typical page. Removing them removes dozens of hidden requests you never asked for. You can read the full detail on our privacy page.
System fonts, and one small custom one
Custom web fonts are convenient and heavy, since your browser has to download an entire typeface before it can draw a word. So the body text here uses the fonts already on your device, which cost nothing to load. We kept a single custom typeface for headings and interface labels, in one weight only, in the most compact modern format. One small font instead of a family of large ones.
Almost no code
This site is built as plain static pages, generated ahead of time, with a small amount of hand written JavaScript rather than a heavy framework. The stylesheet and scripts are minified when the site is built, which strips out every space and comment a browser does not need. There is no giant library doing the work of a few lines of code. When something can be done with less, we do it with less.
We measure it, out loud
At the bottom of every page you will find that page's actual weight and a rough estimate of the carbon it costs to load. This is calculated when the site is built, by adding up every file the page really pulls in. We put it in plain view because a footprint you cannot see is a footprint that is easy to ignore. If a page ever starts creeping up in weight, the number tells on us.
Made to last
Small also tends to mean durable. Plain static pages with few dependencies keep working for a long time without maintenance, and they do not break when some third party service disappears. The lightest page is often also the most robust one. There is an environmental argument in that too, since software that has to be constantly rebuilt and replaced has a cost of its own.
THE POINT
A festival of tiny films deserves a tiny website. But the deeper point is that the heavy web is a choice, not a law of nature, and lighter choices are available at every step. We do not think everyone needs to dither their images down to eight colors. We do think it is worth noticing how much the web asks your devices and the grid to carry, and worth asking, each time, whether all of it is really necessary.
If you are curious about the films that started all of this, the festival is the place to look. If you want to make your own work small, our resources can help. And if you just enjoyed a website that loaded quickly and did not follow you around, then it did its job.
This website was designed and built by Joni Schinkel.
