Purpose – Web is no longer solely about functionality and information as it used to be. Nowadays the aesthetic aspects, including creativity, could be considered just as important. However, web designers still need to fulfil the needs of clients and users in the design process which causes various design constraints. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how web designers’ creativity is affected by various design constraints. This is explored by one main research question and a sub-question: 1.) How is web designers’ creativity affected by design constraints?; 1.1) What could cause web designers to break web design guidelines? Method – This research applied an inductive, qualitative approach with an exploratory view. In order to find answers for the research questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 participants from the field of web design. The data gathered was later analysed and evaluated through thematic analysis Conclusions – The findings of this study suggest that while there are some positive effects, web designers’ creativity is mostly negatively affected by design constraints. Furthermore, it seems web designers break web design guidelines due to finding them irrelevant and/or to get a more creative outcome as well as breaking them unintentionally. Delimitations – This study only covers how web designers reason regards the research questions and does not include the perspective of web developers. Moreover, this thesis focuses solely on website design and does not involve design for mobile applications.

In recent years, the web development industry has made websites more sustainable through green hosting and sustainable approaches in both back-end and front-end levels of websites. This study evaluates and aims to improve existing guidelines for designing lower-impact websites in the e-commerce sector. First, the study investigates the Internet users’ awareness of the Internet’s carbon footprint and their impressions of existing lower-impact websites. This data is then used to construct and conduct focus groups. The Internet’s impact on the environment and existing lower-impact website solutions are further analysed and dis-cussed in the grocery e-commerce context. These findings are then used as a base to build a lower-impact grocery e-commerce website prototype and test it with users and evaluate its attractiveness based on a hedonic/pragmatic model. The study reveals that users are pretty acceptive of the front-end changes to a website to make it more sustainable and willing to change their online habits. However, as current user awareness and knowledge about the Internet’s carbon footprint is very low, any changes to the User Experience (UX) of a website to make it more sustainable need to be communicated to the user.