Jones-Onslow Membership Electric Corporation

Helping you save energy, money, and time.

Company:

Jones-Onslow Membership Electric Corporation

Location:

Jacksonville, North Carolina

Industry:

Electric Utility

Service:

High Impact Website Creation

Platform:

WordPress

Release:

August 9th, 2022

Jones-Onslow Membership Electric Corporation

Jones-Onslow Electric Membership Corporation (JOEMC) is an independent, democratically run electric utility company based out of Jacksonville, North Carolina. JOEMC’s mission is to provide safe, reliable, and affordable electric service with uncompromised excellence in customer service while committing to improving the quality of life for our members through community and civic involvement. In business since 1939, JOEMC serves over 75,000 customers and is one of the fastest growing and most innovative cooperatives in the United States.

Challenge:

JOEMC came to Stand And Stretch after passing on offers from many other digital marketing agencies to redesign their website. They needed to modernize their website, re-work their sitemap, optimize their UX design, and ultimately provide their large customer base with an easily navigable, standards-friendly, responsive website. Redesigning an existing website, especially one with tons of content that thousands of people actively use per day, can be an organizational bear. One of the biggest challenges of this project was to take dozens of pages of content and organize them into a navigational structure that was more user-friendly and accessible.

Solution:

First, our team wanted to build a concept design that would allow us the freedom to fully customize the way users navigate the site to encourage streamlined browsing experiences per device type. We wanted users to be able to quickly access information in an organizational format that made more sense. To do this, we reorganized content into tiered categories, built landing pages for top-level pages with custom anchored menus, and created separate sub-navigation menu systems for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. By creating these different sub-navigation structures by device, we could craft a different browsing experience for users on every type of device while maintaining a cohesive visual experience.
joemc mobile mock
JOEMC Desktop Mock
joemc subnav challenge

Challenge:

One of the challenges of working with an energy cooperative is that the structure of the client’s company is democratic from the ground up. Rather than one or two people making or approving decisions during the development process, JOEMC had a selected panel of stakeholder representatives reviewing all changes at every development stage. This allowed their company to be connected intimately with the design process which is great! However, we needed to make sure that having that many voices in the room making decisions would not slow down the development process when reviewing and approving design or content. Similarly, we anticipated that project needs would evolve often with feedback from the client’s focus group. As such, we needed to create an internal development structure that would keep the project organized and on track while allowing room for the content and structure of the site to develop.

Solution:

Stand And Stretch is a small, tight-knit group of design professionals from around the world working in tandem across time zones. One of the advantages of working with a company like ours on design projects is that a limited number of hands are touching each project, even for websites of this scale. This allows us to communicate more efficiently with clients, and quickly adapt to evolving needs within the development cycle of a project. While Stand And Stretch use a framework in our project management process of “waterfall” style project milestones, we largely utilize an “agile” approach to development in web design so that we can quickly adapt to evolving needs within the design process, especially when tackling projects of this scope. Our design team created a series of internal process documents tailored to the scope and organizational challenges of this project to keep us on track through the development process. We also designed a multi-tiered review process that facilitated both our extensive internal review and allowed for an external team from the client’s corporation to provide us with consistent feedback during each stage of the development cycle.

Brand Assets

Logo

JOEMC Logo

Brand Colors

#018559
#9DC327
#024D76
#333333

Fonts

JOEMC font example

Challenge:

Many clients with existing websites, especially those focused on customer service and interaction, have heavily customized input forms, feedback systems, and sometimes proprietary security features. These can vary from 3rd party plugins and integrated scripts to private secured hosting maintained by other teams of professionals, both internal and external. JOEMC manages its own secure hosting and has a rigorous internal security system. This made it challenging to pull content from their existing site. They also had several custom-coded forms and integrated plugins. These features were tailored to the needs of the existing site and needed to be adapted or recreated for the new website we were developing. Similarly, JOEMC needed an agency with a team of professionals comfortable with working with other IT professionals without having to subcontract these needs.

Solution:

While we at Stand And Stretch manage our own cloud-hosting service that many clients choose to use, some clients require specialized hosting solutions. Our team worked with members of the JOEMC technical staff to adapt their proprietary server-side security systems to the new site and facilitated the process of moving the site from our development servers to JOEMC’s secured hosting. We also found during the development process that some crucial forms that existed on the old website were not compatible with the newer development environment and tools we were utilizing to develop the new website. Our team created new custom scripts and forms to integrate with both the external security system and our tools. We did extensive testing before launching the site to make sure that form submissions would be smooth and uninterrupted. Our team welcomes collaboration, and while we can handle many issues in-house (such as the custom coding required for this website), we welcome working with talented IT professionals outside our organization when a project has special requirements outside the scope of our normal development process.
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Work With Us

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Let's work together on your next digital project!