10 Inspirational Examples of Great Utility Web Design

October 19, 2022

Are you struggling with inspiration for your new utility site? Powerful offers a variety of features to take your website to the next level. Start by taking a look at some great Powerful utility web design examples.

Springfield Utility Board

Organizational Mega Menus

The main benefit of a mega menu is that they’re comprehensive and ensure all pages of your site are included within the navigation menu. Site visitors will always have easy access to every page on your site, helping them to quickly find exactly what they want.

Mega menus ensure that no page is hidden from their site visitor. All pages can be seen in the menu without having to scroll or go into subpages.

Quick and Easy Online Forms

Springfield Utility Board chose to repurpose many of their traditional PDF forms into online forms that create an interactive experience for site visitors, providing the ability to submit information in real-time.

Conditional logic and pre-populated fields not only improve efficiency but also the integrity of collected data. PDFs and paper forms provide countless opportunities for human error, resulting in missing information, incorrect data, redundant data, and a variety of other mistakes that compromise the integrity of the data collection at your utility organization.

Online fillable forms minimize data entry demands and provide users with the features they need to enter only the most accurate data. This means that once data reaches your utility systems of record, and databases, it has already been ‘sanitized’.

The conversion to online forms is beneficial to your member or customers service teams as well as the site visitor. Our forms are completely customizable to fit your utility’s specific needs to create a useful way for you to receive information from your site visitors.

Swift Call to Action Buttons

Call to action buttons ensure that high trafficked areas on their site are visible on their home page “above the fold” (they appear on the home screen without having to scroll). Springfield Utility Board is anticipating their site visitors needs and making that easily accessible to them with these quick call to action buttons.

Promotional Based Home Page

Holding a tablet that showcases the website for Springfield Utility Board — Here, Springfield Utility Board (SUB) utilizes Powerful’s Laurelhurst blueprint to communicate their services clearly and concisely. Site visitors can easily recognize SUB as a reliable utility.

The use of promotions on their home page gets any specific message to the forefront by displaying them on the home page. By having these promotions on the home page, your site visitors are more likely to engage with this content in a clear and concise manner.

Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative

Custom Illustrated Footer

Shenandoah Valley Electric opted to integrate a custom footer illustration to capture elements of their service territory while creating a welcoming feel to the web design for their electric cooperative.

Their custom footer illustration gives a subtle nod to their members of the unique area they serve. Custom footer illustrations leave a positive impression on the members of their electric cooperative.

Staff Directory

Repurposed PDF Forms to Interactive Online Forms

Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative took advantage of our conversion of PDF forms to online forms. Converting these PDF forms to online forms not only saves time for the site visitor but the staff members at the cooperative as well. Members will no longer need to go through the hassle of printing forms and submitting them in-person.

Hoosier Energy’s Why Electrify

Educational Information displayed with a Scrolling Storytelling Home Page

As Hoosier Energy had a goal of sharing the benefits of electrification, a story-telling layout for their utility web design was clearly the best choice with anchor scrolling sections on their new home page.

Their scrolling storytelling home page displays this distinctive educational information in a fun and user-friendly way. The right sided homepage navigation with anchor scrolling gives the site visitors a simple way to navigate between the sections.

Content Visualization

The Why Electrify website by Hoosier Energy, showcases data visualization pages, this one focuses on the Cooperative Difference.

The additions of their customized visualized pages provide micro-animations, or functional animations that can explain content without using a word, to break down walls of text. These visualized pages alongside the homepage video background creates a visually appealing feel for the site.

Union Rural Electric Cooperative

Task-oriented Home Page

A home page that integrates quick login for account management with SmartHub as well as all top tasks at the front and center for easy access in this task-focused homepage layout for Union Rural Electric Cooperative

Interactive Online Forms

Launched in August 2022, completing tasks with ease was the primary goal for the new website at Union Rural Electric Cooperative in Ohio. With this in mind, more than 100 pages of PDFs and forms were repurposed into online web forms, empowering members to complete tasks easier than ever before.

The SmartHub embedded login to bill-pay box displayed in the hero image banner section of their home page gives members the ability to quickly access their account information on the forefront of the site.

Hood River Electric & Internet Co-Op

Hood River Electric & Internet Co-op was awarded its first Excellence in Communications award—a first-place one in Website, Group A at the Northwest Public Power Association conference for Northwest Innovations and Communications in Anchorage, Alaska this year.

Hood River Electric & Internet Co-op General Manager, Libby Calnon receives the Northwest Public Power Association’s Champion of Communications Award. The award honors an individual who has demonstrated a commitment to the public power industry, communications, and public involvement.

“The Powerful team is easy to work with and builds gorgeous, functional sites that are easy to navigate and update.” Libby Calnon, General Manager of Hood River Electric Cooperative

Hood River Electric & Internet Co-Op overhauled their brand but paid tribute to their legacy brand by incorporating apple and pear orchards as well as a watermark of the apple and pear that were in their original logo into the footer of their homepage.

By breaking content up and adding vector graphics throughout, Hood River Electric & Internet Co-Op ensured that content would be easier for members to digest as they have increased the likelihood of engagement with their content while simultaneously creating a more visually appealing experience.

The mobile experience was a top priority during the redesign of the website for Hood River Electric & Internet Co-Op. Utilizing our Ashland blueprint for task-oriented site visitors ensured that there was ample room for integration of an embedded login for NISC’s SmartHub platform as well as quick links to top tasks such as starting and stopping service, checking webmail and getting information regarding unclaimed capital credits.

Public Power Council

Oklahoma Living Magazine

Comments from Judges at the Statewide Editors Association

Oklahoma Living is a superb example of a cooperative website. The site includes wide ranging content support and specialized layouts. It includes built in accessibility features, non login based cooperative selection and highly specialized calendar layouts. The site is also highly performant and mobile optimized.

This Oklahoma Living site has a flavor all it’s own. It looks and feels like a bespoke site created from the ground up to reflect Oklahoma Living to it’s core. Every decision made be it design, functionality, or function seems to come from a single unified source, and as such the site is focused and well thought out.

The Oklahoma Living site seems like a direct natural extension of the publication on which it’s based. It also doesn’t seem to merely be the on line version of that publication but a true home for that content outside and independent of the publication.

The design and art direction behind Oklahoma Living is outstanding. Every page and feature seems considered and measured for value. The content is clearly denoted for easy navigation, sections are separated by breaks and design elements, typography and photography are used to great effect throughout to promote the brand with a singular focus. The Design integration is very powerful in creating a unified platform that’s welcoming and easy for users to pass from online to physical publication without problems. The site is heavily mobile optimized as well.

Oklahoma Living could be used as a study on how to effectively take a printed publication and online presence and match them so that each compliments the other. It’s not fully flawless but its pretty close.

The Oklahoma Living homepage places the magazine’s monthly spotlight story front and center, taking advantage of a full-screen layout to showcase the repurposed photography from the monthly print publication.

Converting the variety of content in a magazine to an online platform was a creative task that was accomplished beautifully and structured organizationally for the site member to navigate the site with ease.

The home page is full of content that is broken up into clear and concise sections. Our design and content strategists were able to repurpose an abundance of content for web that makes it easy for their content mangers to continually update.

A proactive approach to an event calendar was created to ensure that the most relevant content is what is on display for readers. As events pass they are automatically removed from the site, eliminating the need for continuous updates throughout the month.

Grays Harbor PUD

Data Visualization

Content Visualization

Grays Harbor worked to visualize pages throughout their site to create a more engaging experience while retaining large amounts of information.

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative (SMECO)

Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative serves 150,000 consumer-members in the Washington, D.C. metro area. During the web design process they streamlined processes within their utility organization by implementing online forms, visualized numerous pages to create more engaging content, brought a local vibe to their website with a custom illustrated footer and implemented

The capital credit lookup tool assists members of the cooperative to easily access their capital credits by simply searching by their name. Their site has created simplicity and efficiency for their cooperative.

Corporate Communications Managing Director, Terry Ressler, raves about the new site, saying: “Powerful designed, built, and launched the website in about six months. We have been very pleased with the results. The process was smooth, and Powerful supported our go-live with training and follow-up. We are looking forward to a successful partnership for years to come.”

Powerful web team is here to make your website dreams a digital reality! With plenty of successful websites to spark your inspiration, get creative and let us do the hard work!

Want to get started on your website, Request a Demo.