Energy & Utilities - Web Design
A utility website isn't a marketing site with a bill pay button added on. It's the primary digital channel for a service relationship that touches every household and business in your service territory. We build custom WordPress sites for electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, water utilities, natural gas providers, and energy service companies, designed around the operational workflows you actually run: CIS integration, outage status, payment portals, and governance publishing.
Overview
Seven things every utility site needs. We build all of them in from day one.
This is now an enforceable legal requirement for many public utilities under ADA Title II, with deadlines running from April 2026 through April 2027. Compliance means proper heading structure, keyboard navigability, sufficient color contrast, accessible forms, and alt text throughout. We build to this standard from the start, not as a retrofit.
Your customer self-service portal (SmartHub, NISC iVUE, CustomerConnect, CIS-Infinity, Oracle CC&B, SEDC) needs to connect cleanly to your WordPress front-end without creating a fragile custom bridge. We handle the integration architecture so customers move between your site and your portal without friction.
Real-time outage maps need to render on mobile, load fast, and be easy to find. Emergency alert publishing needs to be fast enough for your communications team to push a status update at 11 PM without developer assistance. Both require deliberate design and CMS configuration.
55-65% of utility website visits come from mobile devices. Payment flows, outage reporting, service request forms, and contact information all need to work correctly on a phone screen, in a single hand, under stress.
Rate schedules, tariff filings, board meeting agendas, minutes, annual reports, and regulatory notices need a structured, organized publishing workflow that non-technical staff can manage without breaking the site.
Utility service territories often include significant non-English speaking populations. Core customer-facing pages, billing, service requests, outage information, and emergency alerts, need to be accessible in the languages your customers actually speak.
Utilities are high-value targets. Your WordPress site needs hardened security configuration, monitored uptime, and a response plan for vulnerabilities, not just a plugin installed and forgotten.
Process
Six stages from kickoff to launch. Every one built around your operational reality, not a generic template.
We start by understanding your CIS environment, your customer demographics, your compliance obligations, and the specific workflows your communications and operations teams need to own. We document your integration requirements, CIS, outage map, payment gateway, form routing, before any design work begins.
We map your WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements against your site's intended functionality and build a compliance plan into the project scope from day one. This includes form design, color palette selection, navigation structure, and document publishing workflows.
We design for your customer's most critical journeys first: pay a bill, check outage status, start or stop service, find contact information. Desktop and mobile designs are developed in parallel. Your team reviews and approves before any development begins.
We build on WordPress with your CIS integrations, payment flows, outage map embeds, multilingual support, and form architecture in place. We configure your CMS to match your actual publishing workflows: who can publish what, how governance documents are organized, how emergency alerts get pushed.
Before launch, every site goes through our 75+ point quality audit. This includes automated accessibility scanning, manual keyboard navigation testing, mobile rendering across device types, form submission testing, CIS integration verification, and load performance testing. No site ships without passing the full audit.
We train your communications and operations staff on the CMS workflows they'll own: publishing board meeting materials, updating rate schedules, pushing emergency alerts, and managing multilingual content. Written documentation stays with you.
The platforms your operations team already runs. Every utility site we build gets integrated with the systems your organization depends on, not a generic stack.
CIS platforms
SmartHub, NISC iVUE, SEDC, CustomerConnect, CIS-Infinity, Oracle CC&B. We build WordPress front-ends that connect cleanly to these systems, so customers move between your site and your portal without friction.
Outage visibility
OMS map embeds, including Milestone. We integrate outage map embeds so they display correctly on mobile, load quickly, and are accessible to customers using assistive technologies.
Payments
Stripe and utility bill-pay gateways. PCI DSS-compliant payment processing integration for utilities that take payments directly on their site rather than routing entirely to a CIS portal.
Forms
Gravity Forms (ADA-compliant). Service request forms, start/stop service applications, new account enrollment, and rebate applications configured to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA form requirements.
Language access
WPML. The WordPress Multilingual Plugin for serving utility customers in Spanish, Vietnamese, Hmong, Portuguese, and other languages relevant to your service territory.
Communications
Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Zapier, ReCaptcha v3. Newsletter and outage notification distribution, workflow automation connecting form submissions to backend systems, and bot protection without added friction.
Pricing
Every project's scoped after a free consultation. These are real ranges from the utility sites we've built, not minimums designed to get you in the door.
Foundation
$2,000-$5,000
One-time build
Full-Service
$5,000-$8,000
One-time build
Enterprise / Multi-Site
$8,000-$12,000
Scoped individually
Most utility websites fall in the $2,000-$12,000 range. Projects with deep CIS integration, multilingual requirements, or complex governance publishing workflows move toward the upper end or into the enterprise tier. Every project is scoped after a free consultation, not sold as a fixed package.
Send us your project and we'll scope it straight -- no pushy sales.
Deeper reads pulled from our blog, all written with energy and utilities companies in mind.
Good to know
Most utility website projects fall between $5,000 and $15,000. That range covers custom design, ADA/WCAG compliant builds, standard CIS portal integration, mobile-optimized layouts, and a properly structured CMS for governance publishing. Projects with deep CIS integration work, multilingual requirements, outage map configuration, or payment gateway integration on top of a CIS portal can move higher. We scope every project after understanding your actual requirements. There are no fixed packages and no hidden costs.
A standard utility website project runs 8 to 14 weeks from signed agreement to launch. Projects with complex CIS integrations, WCAG compliance remediation on legacy content, or multilingual builds typically run 12 to 16 weeks. We set a realistic timeline at the start of every project and communicate clearly if anything changes it.
Yes. Most of our utility projects are redesigns, not greenfield builds. We audit your existing integrations before scoping, document how they work, and build the new site so those connections are maintained or improved. We don't cut over to a new site until every integration has been tested and confirmed.
Web page accessibility is within our scope and is part of every utility build we deliver. PDF accessibility, rate schedules, board minutes, annual reports, is a separate discipline that involves document remediation. We can advise on your document accessibility posture and connect you with the right resources, but PDF remediation at scale is typically handled by a specialist. We make sure the web-based publishing workflow for those documents is itself accessible.
We build your CMS so updating a rate schedule, uploading a new tariff filing, or publishing a regulatory notice is a task your communications staff can complete in a few minutes without developer assistance. We document the publishing workflow and train your team before handoff. If you also have a WordPress maintenance plan with us, we're available to assist with any CMS question that comes up after launch. Learn more about WordPress maintenance for utility companies.
Still have questions? We're happy to answer them, let's connect.
Tell us about your project and we'll take a look. No pushy sales, no wasted calls.