Fall is budget season for most utilities, which makes it the right time to take a hard look at your website before the calendar turns. A site that quietly went stale over the year can undercut the rest of your customer communication, even if nobody on staff has noticed. We covered the bigger question of how often to update your site in a previous issue (“How Often Should You Update Your Utility Website? A Practical Answer”). This time, we want to give you something you can actually work through this quarter: a short, practical checklist to run before year-end.
Why Now
Most utilities finalize next year’s budget in Q4, and many websites end up as an afterthought in that process. A fall audit gives you a clean list of fixes and, if needed, a case for funding them before the new fiscal year starts. It also means you start January with a site that reflects where the utility actually stands today, not where it stood last spring.
Four Places to Start
Work through these four areas first. They take the least time to check and tend to cause the most trouble when left alone.
- Broken links. Run a link check across your main pages, especially anything tied to payments, outage reporting, or forms. A broken link on a bill-pay page generates phone calls, and phone calls cost more staff time than the audit does.
- Outdated rate information. Rate schedules, fee tables, and tariff pages are easy to forget once they are published. If rates changed this year and the website did not, that is the first thing to fix, and the easiest one to justify to leadership.
- Expired promotions and programs. Rebate programs, seasonal offers, and limited-time initiatives have a way of staying on the homepage long after they end. Confirm each active promotion still applies, and retire the ones that do not.
- Stale staff photos and directory listings. Leadership pages and staff directories drift out of date as people change roles or leave. A visitor who calls a wrong extension, or recognizes a photo of someone no longer there, notices that the site has not been touched in a while.
Beyond the Basics
If time allows, add a few more items to the list: confirm the copyright year in your footer, verify emergency and outage contact numbers are current, and check that any board or meeting documents posted for compliance reflect the latest filings. None of these take long individually, but together they close most of the gaps that build up over a year of normal business.
Turn the List Into a Plan
A checklist only helps if someone owns it. Assign each item to a person, set a deadline inside Q4, and keep the list on hand for next year’s audit. Utilities that treat this as a recurring fall task, rather than a one-time cleanup, tend to catch problems long before a customer does.
Article provided by Donald Moore, President, Moore Tech Solutions, Inc., a web design and digital marketing agency serving utilities and businesses across Alabama and the Southeast.