Mobile-first for the website relaunch

Stadtwerke Potsdam GmbH is a municipally owned company operated by the City of Potsdam that operates in business segments as diverse as energy supply, water supply and waste water treatment, waste management, public transport, urban lighting and public bathing facilities.

The portal in use was no longer able to handle increasing demand nor provide a high-quality customer experience. The company also wanted to add in additional features, such as advice on waste disposal, timetables and an electricity rates comparison service.

The new website needed to combine improved navigation with a fresh look-and-feel. Accessibility was another important topic, as were interactive services and a generally more user-focused structure.

During implementation, one further objective—preparing the information architecture, design and content management system for a future customer portal—also needed to be taken into account. Last but not least, reporting was also formulated as an additional requirement, so as to measure and further optimise website appeal.

The new Stadtwerke Potsdam website offers a wide range of services and information from its five business units for Potsdam’s 170,000 citizens, while reserving potential for the future thanks to its modular structure. Independent features such as the electricity and gas rates comparison service were developed during the project. Thanks to the combination of FirstSpirit, Formcentric, Universal Messenger from partner Pinuts and the Docker container technology, the new portal is also future-proof: release cycles can be shortened and costs can be reduced.

To ensure optimum implementation of the requirements, the client’s website specification was first optimized and the design customized to fit a mobile-first strategy. Accessibility and responsiveness were also accounted for to ensure uniform access to all user groups. Thanks to the use of the latest FirstSpirit version and the ContentCreator, editorial staff are now able to preview their changes before these are published to the platform.

To drive digital interaction and handle automatic data post-processing, Monday Consulting implemented its own Formcentric product. Thanks to the shared interface provided by the Universal Messenger from Pinuts, the data input by users can now be analyzed and republished faster than ever. For updates, only the details in the database for the respective service need to be adjusted: the workflow between data input and output has not been altered. This offers cost advantages while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of errors.

The appealing design and wide range of services is supported by the flexible structure of the new platform. The modular microservice architecture, consisting of independent processes with data drawn from a variety of sources, enables the rapid integration of new interfaces to respond to new customer requirements. Together with Docker container technology, this simplifies both publication to platform users and operation of the solutions at the customer. As a result, Stadtwerke Potsdam has gained a flexible solution that not only meets the latest demanding web standards but is also well prepared to handle future developments.