Good caring websites

What do you think of when care or caring are mentioned? Governments and the media talk a lot about hospitals, homes for the elderly, social services and other such “care services”, so perhaps those comes to mind. No doubt there is a lot of caring going on in those places, but it is individuals who are caring, not the organisations who employ – or even exploit – these caring people.

Individuals who care

The 512KB Club was created by an individual (Kevin Quirk) who cares about the web. Perhaps byte sizes, client-side queries, CMS theme performance and such like do not spring to mind in a discussion about caring but we are “on the web” now and you are reading an article that has jumped through many technical hoops before it reached your screen. If the web becomes more technically tangled and bloated, then no amount of cool devices or generations of bandwidth speed will do much to help. The web for many will become like a constant Friday evening traffic jam.

The 512KB Club

The 512KB Club features sites whose size is less than 512kb. To achieve this requires the website makers to follow best practices with regard to coding, image optimization and search engine optimization. This is win-win for everyone because not only can you can still have a beautiful site that is available on all devices, but you’ve also just helped speed up the web and untangle some of the bloat too.

What is beautiful?

Not all of the sites on the 512KB Club might be thought of as beautiful, especially the super-small ones without images, but those are mostly computer nerd sites and their target audience understands a website does not need images. Those small size websites are a different kind of beautiful in the eyes of their beholders. An image might speak a thousand words but it doesn’t convey code very well.

Open-source

Most if not all 512KB Club sites are made by people who appreciate open-source. I don’t know how many millions of open-source contributors there are, but there are billions of people benefiting from open-source. The Textpattern Forum is a good example of a place where open-source contributors interact and it is heart-warming to see the care they put into their work and the consideration they have for each other. I hope the 512KB Club members are similarly as kind and considerate.

Care, kindness and consideration

Caring, kindness and consideration are beautiful human gifts we all possess at any given moment and we can apply them at any given moment to whatever we wish. Unfortunately, we forget how true that is as we are swept along by ever-changing “advances” and “progress”. It’s sad to see such rapid changes in technology seemingly matched by rapid increases in inhumanity and exploitation. Now that almost everyone uses the web, we can at least try to protect and keep human the parts of the web we inhabit. The 512KB Club is helping to do that and I am proud to be a member of the