Go Green, the Natural Step and Sustainability

Posted • November 14, 2008 • 1 Comment

Going Green doesn’t always equal Sustainability

I attended the Natural Step open house in Portland, Oregon last night.

It was a great standing room only affair with beer and wine in ample supplies and food to die for. As I weaved my way patiently through their new digs I could hear discussions of what sustainability was, what it meant to everyone’s business and why they were interested in going green. There was a slide show playing a loop on the East wall of the office giving tribute to sponsors and giving some of the latest local sustainability news.

Definition for Sustainability

Scientists agree that our current unsustainable path comes from four basic root causes directly related to human activity. In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:

• concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
• concentrations of substances produced by society
• degradation by physical means
• people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine there capacity to meet their needs

As I made my way back to the North end of the office where most of the people seemed to congregate I realized why. The marvelous food was laid out there in all it’s spectacular glory. Crave catering was offering grilled beef skewers and artichoke cups. The artichoke cups were just incredible, they were the perfect combination of spices and texture. You can visit Crave Catering online at Portland-Catering.com. The other food offering was by Artemis Foods. Artemis had quite a display the delicacy that caught my eye was there beautiful truffles. I almost missed the tiny URL in their literature, they are at ArtemisFoods.com.

the Natural Step

When I got home from the soiree I decided to visit the Natural Step website to find out more information about them. Since there URL is very prominent on their literature I figured I was in for a treat. Their home page was impressive at the least. Beautiful lay out, the colors are very attractive, and the navigation looked clean and simple. I clicked on the top level “OUR SOLUTIONS” and was hit in the face with a 404.

OK, I decided to use one of the drop down links I chose “+ Solutions for Business” I knew this would take me to a page. Guess what it did!

It took me to a page alright but a page with no information. And why would I want to share it?

Don’t make these mistakes with your site. Make sure if it is a link it will actually go to a real page and not an error page and make sure if you have a page at the end of a link it actually has information on it.

It is OK to launch your site before it is complete (by definition a website is never complete it is always growing) just don’t make your visitors pay in advance for your lack of content. The search engines don’t like this either. We don’t want either our people visitors or the search engines spiders disappointed with us. It could be fatal for our internet sustainability even if we are going green.

Late,
Gary Pool

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