New Year Resolutions for Best Website Practices!

2024 is here! There is no better way to start the new year than a fresh website for your utility organization. The feeling of starting your new year with an innovative design with the Powerful team’s best practices can’t be measured.   Let’s dive deep into our trusted web expert’s New Year’s Resolutions for 2024!

Accessibility is so in for 2024

Being accessible doesn’t just mean having a virtual assistant to help a lost navigator, it means anyone who visits your website can have an equal opportunity to access all the information available to the public.  The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes access to the Web as a basic human right. The Americans with Disabilities Act protects those who may be visually impaired and rely on software and tools like screen readers to assist them when browsing web pages.

At Powerful, we like to go above and beyond what’s expected of us.  What does taking that further look like? First, we ensure all our hyperlinks include a description of what the site visitor is clicking.  For those who use assistive technology to navigate a website, they may hover over five or six “click here” links all while having no idea where each hyperlink may bring them.  Let’s take a look at how Fannin Electric Cooperative, out of Texas who recently went through a web redesign, wrote their hyperlinks.

Keep going above and beyond

Another way our Powerful team is reimagining accessibility is with our landing pages. When we first partner with a utility organization, we have to look deeper into who exactly they serve, more often than not we find that they serve rural areas.  According to the latest census data, it is proven that the rural parts of our country have an older demographic than their urban counterparts. When we serve an older demographic, we know some of those members may have their own set of accessibility limitations, whether it’s a lack of motor skills to navigate a drop-down menu, a shaky hand, or even a challenge with screen glare straining their vision.

We have implement landing pages that give the website visitor the ability to click the top-level link such as the “about us” or “community” tabs in the global navigation menu, bringing them to a page which has the same options as the drop-down menu, with larger navigation tiles. This helps those who struggle to navigate due to those shaky hands or may not be as experienced in navigating websites. Fannin Electric Cooperative also incorporated this into their website accessibility plan during the implementation phase of their website’s design.

Cleaning out those Old PDFs

Websites like Amazon allow us to find what we want and have it on our doorstep in no time. Now imagine if you were on Amazon’s website and had to print out an order form, and fill it out manually with your information.  You would then take that paper form, fax it, or mail it to their main office to get your order processed. Could you imagine going through that archaic system in today’s world of technology? This is what some members must do to apply for services throughout utility organizations all over the country.

2024 is the year to move away from PDFs, and to do that we have transitioned those PDFs into online forms that a site visitor can fill out in seconds.  Transitioning printable forms into online gravity forms with our Powerful Forms App is not just desired by customers and members, it’s the expectation.  SEMO Electric made conscious efforts to make that leap in the past few months as they unveiled their new Powerful website. Instead of transitioning their PDF forms from their old website, we collaborated with their team and after reviewing their PDFs, we converted them into easy-to-fill-out online forms.

Converting these PDFs into online fillable forms benefits not only the member but also the staff member who oversees receiving these requests. Instead of struggling to read handwriting sent through a scanned document, or a document which may be upside down or cut off from the scanner, the staff member receives an email with all the fields filled out in an easy-to-read display.

Eliminating “Pinching and Zooming”

Around 85% of all adults own a smartphone, so 2024 is not the year of the smartphone, but it is the year of having a website that is responsive on a mobile device.  If you’ve ever been on your phone and had to navigate a desktop version of a website, you know it can be frustrating to pinch and zoom to read the text. Having a mobile-responsive website is imperative as we move into this new year.

People are on their phones more than ever; we not only want but expect information to always be at our fingertips. This is causing more traffic coming from the mobile realm than ever before. However, frustration can set in when the format of a website doesn’t fit a smaller screen.  Websites built for a desktop and transitioned to a mobile device are often hard to navigate and involve lots of pinching and zooming in to read the text, and that’s if it’s not cut off by the smaller screen.

We do things a little differently, we build each website with a mobile-first approach. We develop the website for the mobile experience first and foremost, ensuring it looks and reads well on a mobile device, and then expand outward with different-sized screens. Along the way we keep that standard that our site visitor expects, until we finally land on the tried-and-true desktop version. When we revamped the Arkansas Living Magazine website, we knew the reader would be accessing their magazine while on the go, whether that was keeping up stories with from across the state or trying to remember a certain recipe they saw a few months ago.  The Arkansas Living team was intentional throughout the entire project to ensure they were keeping the same consistency that a site visitor might experience on their computer to what they see on their mobile device.

It’s the year to break down that wall of words

Let’s talk content!  Often, we see organizations stress too much about the design of their web pages, getting wrapped into what fonts to use, and what colors look good where; all of which are valid concerns, but they often forget about what is the most important, their content.  Content is the meat and potatoes of your website. It’s what your site visitors are going there to see, so if it’s not pleasant to read, it’s not going to resonate with that viewer. When we redesign a website, we have a few options for ways to migrate your content.

It is common on web pages to see a large body of text with main facts buried within for the site reader to decipher by reading an in-depth wall of words.  In our standard migration we integrate what is on your existing web pages, and bring it over to your new website so your content is integrated into the new design.  We don’t just copy and paste it, every page goes through our vetting process of spelling checks, grammar mistakes, checking for ADA and accessibility, and finally, making sure that every hyperlink brings you to the correct destination when clicked.  The standard migration for Dixie Electric in Mississippi ensured all their content was moved over with this process.

Our first step up from this standard migration is our High-Touch pages.  We extract the main facts and focus points of the text, convert it to a bullet list format, and give it eye-catching headers.  This is an easier way to digest the same information from the first example but in a much quicker form. Take Dixie’s “Rate and Fee’s” page, the information is important, but if it was in a huge paragraph form, their members may not read all of it. Breaking it up and adding headers helps the readers progress through the page easier.

The Write New Year’s Resolution!

The last and most eye-catching version of our content integration options is the visualized pages.  We add vibrant colors, icons, bolded text, and in some cases, micro animations.

When we converted the same information into this visualized format, we’ve seen site visitors spend an average of 4 minutes reading the information in contrast to the 26 seconds a viewer spends on a page with the standard text integration.  See how we took an important page like Dixie’s “Who We Are” and added the visualized touch to it!

Ring in the New Year right

As we look toward this new year, with so many different possibilities one of your top priorities should be bringing your website into the new age. We aim to craft powerful messages that cater to not only the utility organizations we partner with but also their members. Let us help you and your utility organization become recognizably Powerful!