Design study · Public utility district · Washington
Follow your power home, from the river to your meter
A modernization concept for a community-owned utility that generates its own hydropower — where the site's first job is telling you whether the lights are coming back on, and its second is showing you where the power comes from.
Concept only, responding to RFP 26-508. Facts come from the RFP and the District's published site and policies; this is not the official Pend Oreille PUD website.
- Utility website design
- WordPress theme
- Status-first homepage
- Rate transparency
- Service-area explorer
- WCAG 2.2 AA
Pend Oreille PUD — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A utility website has one catastrophic failure mode: being useless during an outage, which is precisely when traffic spikes and when the visitor is stressed, possibly on battery, possibly on a weak rural signal. The rest of the year it has a quieter credibility problem — rates. A community-owned utility that buries its rate schedule in a PDF undermines the thing that makes public power worth defending, which is that the customers own it and can see the numbers.
The approach
Status comes first, not a hero image. Beneath it, a pure-CSS scroller follows your power home — the north-flowing Pend Oreille River, Box Canyon Dam, and on to your meter — which does real explanatory work for a district that generates its own hydropower and delivers electric, water, and wholesale fiber. The rate page carries the actual April 2026 figures rather than a link to a document, because transparency that requires a download is not transparency. A three-layer service-area explorer stays accessible rather than becoming an unlabeled map widget, and documents and public records consolidate into a single source. The world is New Deal public-power engineering — turbine bronze, granite, penstock blue — in Archivo, Libre Franklin, and IBM Plex Mono over the District's own photography.
The result
Sixteen routes on a real WordPress theme with a masthead Search-or-Ask over the site and the District's real policies, WCAG 2.2 AA with zero axe violations.
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