Transparency

This page describes how the site you’re reading is built. Not for technical showmanship: we care because every technological choice has consequences — for the people who use it, for the environment, for long-term sustainability.

At Open Innova nothing is there by accident. Even a brochure site is an opportunity to show what we mean when we talk about design essentialism.

How it’s built

The site is completely static: no database, no application server, no runtime logic. Pages are generated at build time and served as-is.

  • Generator: Hugo, one of the fastest static site generators around (written in Go)
  • Languages: HTML, CSS, and a handful of vanilla JavaScript, no framework
  • Fonts: no external fonts — we use the device’s system fonts (San Francisco on macOS/iOS, Segoe UI on Windows, Roboto on Android…)
  • CDN / external resources: none — no Google Fonts, no CDN-hosted libraries, no third-party embeds
  • Third-party services: none — no externally hosted contact form, no chatbot, no popups
  • Hosting: static hosting on AWS S3 with optional CloudFront caching
  • Source code: github.com/ulivs-app/open-innova-website — site templates and assets are public, the copywriting is private

How much it consumes

To estimate this site’s footprint we use the Sustainable Web Design Model v4, the same model behind the Website Carbon Calculator.

A visit to a page of this site moves about 45 KB of data on first load (and less than 25 KB on subsequent visits, thanks to cache).

Starting from that figure:

  • Electricity per visit: ~0.009 Wh (≈ 0.000009 kWh)
  • CO₂e emissions per visit: ~0.004 g (four thousandths of a gram)
  • Data-center cooling water per visit: ~0.005 mL (about 5 microliters)

CO₂e comparisons

To give a sense of scale:

Action Estimated CO₂e
One visit to this site ~0.004 g
Website Carbon “A+” threshold < 0.095 g
A Google search ~0.2 g
An average web page in 2026 ~0.36 g
One minute of HD streaming ~36 g
One kilometre by petrol car ~120 g

In practice: it takes one million visits to generate the CO₂e equivalent of an average car covering 33 km. Not a counting trick: it’s the result of a web page that doesn’t carry what it doesn’t need.

What “cooling water” means

Data centers run hot. Servers in a rack easily exceed 30°C and have to be cooled or they stop working. The most common way to do it, still today, is water evaporation in cooling towers: part of the water turns into vapour, removes heat from the air, and that amount leaves the data-center system.

The evaporated water doesn’t really disappear: sooner or later it falls back as rain somewhere. So where’s the problem? It lies in the fact that water balance is measured locally, not globally:

  • Depletion of the water basin: water is drawn from a specific aqueduct, aquifer, or river. Even if it returns to the hydrological cycle, there’s no guarantee it returns to the same basin.
  • Competition with other uses: most cooling water is potable or groundwater, the same water that serves agriculture, industry, and human consumption.
  • Worsening already arid areas: for cost reasons (land, energy), many data centers concentrate in regions under heavy water stress — Arizona, Texas, Chile, parts of Spain.

The industry standard metric is Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), measured in litres of water consumed per kWh.

To estimate this page’s figure we start from electricity used in the data center and apply a typical WUE (~1.8 L/kWh): it takes a hundred thousand visits to remove the water of a half-litre bottle from the water basin of Milan (IT), where this site is hosted.

For further reading we selected two resources:

What we chose not to do

Every item below is a deliberate choice. We could have added each of these — some are even “industry standard” — but we didn’t.

  • No cookies, of any kind: neither technical/tracking nor profiling
  • No analytics: we don’t know who you are, where you come from, or which pages you open, and we don’t want to know
  • No consent popup: they’re unnecessary if you don’t collect data (GDPR compliance comes from not profiling, not from adding banners)
  • No chatbot, no live chat: if you want to talk to us, write us an email and we’ll reply
  • No fonts from Google: keeping us off Mountain View’s CDN and your page loads faster
  • No heavy decorative images: the few images on the site are SVG under 2 KB
  • No JavaScript framework: 1.3 KB of vanilla JS for the “back to top” button and the info modal
  • No browser storage: no localStorage, no sessionStorage. Even dark/light theme follows your operating system automatically, because remembering a preference would require writing something on your device — and we don’t want to

Why we do it this way

There’s a direct connection between technical essentialism, privacy respect, and low environmental impact. They aren’t three separate goals: they’re the same goal seen from different angles.

A site that doesn’t profile users is also a site that doesn’t load dozens of third-party scripts, that doesn’t slow down the user’s device, that doesn’t waste bandwidth, that doesn’t heat servers more than necessary.

At Open Innova this is the same logic we apply when we design software for our clients: build what’s needed, and no more. It’s harder than adding features, but it produces longer-lasting results.

Sources

CO₂ emissions

Data center water consumption

Spotted something we could remove? Write to us: critiques on essentialism are welcome.