About Ethical Internet

‘Ethical’?

It’s partly about how I work, and partly about who I work with.

How: respecting the environment, and supporting human rights, fair trade, refugees, and victims of war, inequality, and climate change.  Keeping a minimal carbon footprint, for example by using entirely renewable electricity for all servers, services, office and home.  No company car, minimal business car mileage (less than 100 miles most years). No inflated salaries or profits. Obsession with re-use, repair, recycling, composting… compost toilets even. Growing my food.  Eating ethically.  (Applying Permaculture sums up most of the above.)  Also treating customers fairly, giving clear guidance on costs, and conscientious service.

Who for: mostly working for people or organisations who are trying to make the world a better place, and self-employed people earning a living with minimum environmental costs.  Definitely not for people or organisations which excessively damage the environment or society – e.g. by using excessive amounts of fossil fuels or encouraging others to do so (by flying, for example), or by promoting anti-social trends in society.   And obviously no-one involved in things like tobacco, gambling, pesticide use, property speculation, etc.  Mostly they wouldn’t come to me anyway of course!

Who?

Ethical Internet is a website provision and support service, started in 2003 by Peter Richardson. You can read more background info if you are interested.

Where?

As of June 2010, we are now based in Stroud, Gloucestershire. We were previously based near Milton Keynes and still have strong local links there. Our customers are local and national.

Why?

We want to provide the easiest to use, most effective web tools to ethical organisations at affordable prices. With expert support included in the price. That way, any small or medium-sized ethical organisation can run a constantly-up-to-date, genuinely inclusive interactive website (and/or intranet), without spending a fortune on IT staff, consultants, or software.

How?

Nearly all of our new sites are set up using the very popular open source content management system (‘cms’) from wordpress.org. This enables you to change or add pages, rearrange website sections and subsections, upload files, restore old versions of pages, control who can edit different sections of the website, and so on, all using only your web browser, without any programming or specialist skills.

Prior to 2011, all our sites used our own in-house content management system called SiteMachine, which also does all of the above tasks very nicely. However, the enormous userbase of WordPress, with thousands of freely available add-ons and designs means that for most customers it makes sense to choose WordPress these days. Some Sitemachine users are gradually shifting their sites to WordPress, but others are still commissioning new sites using the trusted and true system!

If you would like to see how the Sitemachine system works, you are welcome to download and read the tutorial document (pdf, 1583K)  which accompanies our face to face training sessions.

We originally wrote SiteMachine in the year 2000(!) using a powerful web programming language called ColdFusion, and the open source database MySql. From October 2006 onwards, all our sites were set up using SmPHP, the new version of SiteMachine that we wrote using the open source programming language PHP.

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