Case Study: CPS Energy
Client Profile
Date: 2013
Reach: Texas
Focus: Energy Industry
Challenge
The nation’s largest municipally-owned electric and gas utility company needed a design for their new blog that will showcase news videos and articles. They decided to call the blog “Energized”, but it needed a professional look and feel. We had the task of building a navigation that could handle a lot of different categories and sub menu options. We did not want to have a menu system that was congested with a ton of links. We also had to provide a way for users to search and link to other CPS promotions.
Solution
After looking at a ton of blogs and navigation ideas we came up with nice animated menu system. The header would be “fixed” to the top of the page so that when you scroll down the menu is always available for you to jump to another section. This helps when you are reading a long article, allowing you to quickly jump to another page without working hard to get back to the full menu. The sub-navigation slides down as you rollover a category. When you rollout the menu slides back under the main navigation. To reinforce the progressive thinking of CPS Energy we decided to rotate energy efficient backgrounds behind the entire site. The sidebar serves as a quick link section for social media and other promotions.
Results
In the end we gave CPS Energy a great design that was well received by the industry. The blog was such a success that they are thinking of expanding it to handle more media like press releases. It felt great working with one of the nation’s largest electric/gas companies. David Stinemetze from Widgets and Burritos, LLC did an outstanding job programming the site. He built it in the WordPress framework as a request from the client allowing them to easily make updates to the site. A lot of agencies use WordPress but can’t program it the way we can. We make WordPress work for us and the client. A lot of custom programming comes into play when we build WordPress sites. We designed a custom site and threw WordPress in the backend to make it happen.
