The Living Room of Your Utility Website

February 5, 2024

Our team of Powerful Web experts loves to think of a website as a digital home. One of the most important parts of your home is your living room, it’s the first room your guests see and spend the most time in. When we imagine your utility website like a home, the living room is your home page, it’s the first thing a site visitor sees when entering your site and it leads to all other parts of the home. Here are some of the best tools that you can add to the living room of your website!

A layout customized for your members

It takes mere seconds to judge a website’s usability. So, we build our home pages with the the site visitor in mind. Each utility organization is different and deserves to have a catered home page. We offer different blueprints for different goals. Central Texas Electric Cooperative in Llano, Texas recently worked with our Powerful web design team to thoughtfully design a home page with their members in mind. They recognized that their members were visiting their site mainly to pay their bills or complete a task. Our designers prioritized those top tasks on the home page. Tasks like: “Start/Stop Service” or “Youth Programs” to make it as easy to find as possible. They also opted into the SmartHub login integration on the home page allowing their members to log into their account without having to navigate to find the link.

Having the easiest layout for the members was a very intentional decision by the team at Central Texas Electric. Having all the easiest tasks on the home page allows the site visitor to find what they need without having to navigate tirelessly.

Tell your story with better engagement

Your utility organization’s story is important, your history, and your employees, it’s what makes your organization special, especially in public power, where the community or the members make up the ownership of the organizations. In the cooperative world, the 7 principles are the foundation of the coop, and members need to understand how it affects them, sadly they often don’t. Speaking from personal experience, I grew up on co-op lines in Louisiana but didn’t even know what a cooperative was until I was lucky enough to go on Youth Tour. Members may not know about your history which is disappointing because it affects them in ways they may not even realize, so what if there was a way to teach them without them even realizing it?

Through years of assisting cooperatives reimagine and redesign their websites, we have seen numerous paragraphs on a home page that dive deep into history. These can tell the story, but the challenge is that site visitors often skip right by and go directly to what they came to do. Breaking down this paragraph into a few easily digestible tidbits helps with retention on the site visitor’s side.

Dickson Electric’s “By the Numbers” Section highlighting their municipal utility with three main figures.

Take Dickson Electric in Tennessee, they chose to highlight that they have been in business for 118 years, that their service territory spans over 5 counties, and that they serve over 38,000 members. The animation of the numbers counting attracts the site visitors’ attention and allows Dickson to give them a quick few facts to help their members learn a few facts about their cooperative.

Being transparent with your site visitors

One of the best ways to keep your members or customers involved in your organization is to ensure they know what is happening! Keeping your members or customers in the know is the best way to boost engagement. I was extremely lucky in high school to be told about the Youth Tour, some are not as lucky, they don’t even know the program is an option and so they never have the opportunity to apply. Putting information and deadlines directly on your home page is one of the best ways to keep your customers or members in the know. Here is an example from South Central Power Cooperative in Ohio.

South Central Power’s upcoming events section is an easy scroll on the home page, giving their members access to all the information about what event is next to mark on the calendar.

Notice how their team decided to only include the next three important dates, this was intentional to not overload the site visitor when they visit their website. Adding these events gives off the feeling of being transparent to your members, letting them know exactly what is happening in the community.

Enhancing visibility of contact information for your site visitor

One of the most important aspects and one of the main reasons a member or customer may find themselves on a utility website is to find out how to contact their provider. Through years of focus group research, we found that the biggest complaint that members have is they don’t know how to find or contact their cooperative or utility organization. To some members, it even seems like their utility is “intentionally hiding” from them and that is obviously not a perception we want. The way to overcome this is to give all the information to them on every page. We implement our global footers to every web page, this gives them all the information they may need, like office hours, office or mailing addresses, and maybe most importantly, your phone number.

This footer allows Bartholomew County REMC to give access to all their important information from the bottom of every web page.

This feature allows cooperatives like Bartholomew County REMC in Indiana to put their addresses, phone numbers, and all other important information in their footer. This also allows easy access to common links that a member may want to navigate to. Links to your social media pages, reporting outages, or employment pages of your website.

Get the warm feeling of home!

A common goal of the Powerful team when building a new website is to be intentional with who the audience is. One of the best ways to do that is by using familiar landmarks with photography or our custom-illustrated footers. With these custom-illustrated footers, it allows your team to section off your content from the footer element of our web pages. These custom-illustrated footers tell a story of your service territory. It resonates with those members or customers who live in visit your website, the ones who see these landmarks daily.

Beauregard Electric Cooperative in Louisiana wanted to highlight important parts of their service territory with their Custom Illustrated Footer including their courthouse and sights like the bayou and state tree, the bald cypress.

For Beauregard Electric Cooperative in Louisiana, they decided to implement their courthouse that’s in the center of the community they serve and a swamp background filled with their state tree, the bald cypress. For myself, a person who has grown up in Louisiana, and has been through DeRiddler, Louisiana, I can resonate with the illustrated footer way more than someone who may have never seen a swamp. That is why we customize each illustrated footer to match the feel of the local service territory so it creates a feeling of comfort for the site visitors that live in the community that you serve.