CoServ Electric Co-op

The Client

CoServ Electric is a not-for-profit cooperative, with more than 150,000 members who want convenient and reliable service, stable rates, and energy-saving advice on how to lower their electricity bills. Clarity used design, custom navigation and numerous technologies to help them build a website to deliver just that.

Existing Problems

There wasn’t just one, there were many. To begin, with so many customers, their site wasn’t stable or performed as desired. There was no load-balancing or fail-over set up and the site went down often. The site was built many years earlier and was still on DNN 5. They didn’t have a way to easily show all the members in real-time what the energy usage and availability was, their forms allowed dirty data into their system, which wasn’t integrated with their Oracle back-office system. With hundreds of pages of information, they needed a way to organize it all so their members could easily find information, get advice and pay their bills.

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Our Solutions

Clarity first started with a network design, specifying the hardware, load-balancers, fail-over and backup strategies. Next came updating to the latest version of DNN. Clarity designed the sitemap, lead by a customized mega menu and secondary menuing for clear navigation. An updated design and customized template, which was a custom-built mobile responsive design, to serve their many mobile users. Then came hundreds of custom modules and forms: an interactive mapping tool to display energy usage and available energy stores, forms validation to improve data quality, an Oracle integration so the forms data could be pushed in real-time to the back-office system, and much more. A big piece of the site was their blog and FAQ, since they are the primary communication methods used with the cooperative.

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The Benefits

The first thing members got was a highly performant, mobile responsive website, where they could now easily navigate the thousand pieces of data available. An interactive map shows them in real-time where new and upcoming sources of energy are located. Custom navigation provides single-click access to almost anywhere on the site. Custom forms allow for secure bill paying and energy consumption. The native interface with Facebook keeps them up-to-date on important items without having to check the site every day. The new blog allows members to comment and become part of the cooperative, with categories, live feeds, commenting and authoring, an approval workflow and a custom self-service category-based FAQ with built-in search. Clarity also did a ton of SEO and Social media work, and continues to work with CoServ on their SEO strategies.

Technologies

The front-end CMS is DNN’s Evoq Professional. HTML5, CSS3 and Modernizr was used to create the responsive template.

Clarity Connect, JavaScript, JQuery, Telerik controls were all needed for various features and functionality, as well as a host of DNN modules, like XMod Pro, Easy DNN News, Rotator and Gallery.

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