City Green Solutions is a non-profit focused on energy and water efficiency in homes and buildings. They started working with Caorda in 2015 when we designed a site to help homeowners transition away from using oil heating in their homes. Since that time we have worked with them on many other websites and initiatives such as the Clean BC Better Homes and Better Buildings sites, Jump on a Heat Pump, Home Energy Advice and more.
They approached us again in the Spring of 2020 to help them with a new program they were working on for the Capital Regional District (CRD) – Bring It Home 4 Climate. This program supports community members in the CRD to improve their home energy efficiency and reduce their home carbon footprint.
After the program was a huge success in the CRD, City Green came back to us in the fall of 2022 with a new brand and name for the program – Home Energy Navigator. They had additional municipalities interested and coming on board and wanted to have some different page templates to work with for the different communities.
The Challenge:
As with many of the City Green projects and programs, there is a lot of detailed information to display and many partners involved. In this case, the project started off with the CRD, the Government of Canada and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in addition to City Green. By 2022 Vancouver was coming online and City Green had other municipalities also interested in the program, each needing their own flexible community page.
The site needed to build awareness and educate homeowners on the opportunities for home energy improvements, then direct them to a variety of resources and programs as well as linking them to the financial rebates they could be eligible for. It also needed to be flexible and easy to update for the City Green team so the latest information on rebates, new programs and workshops and other information on the site could be kept current and relevant.
The Solution:
City Green came prepared and had a pretty clear vision for how the site should be organized and the types of information that would be included. This allowed our designer to get right to work creating a clean, easy to navigate site that effectively displayed all the required information. Once the designs had been approved by all the partners our developers got to work building the site using an easy-to-use theme and builder to ensure that City Green would be able to easily keep the site up to date. We made use of custom posts for the site as it provided a clear and easy to follow structure for the homeowners seeking the information as well as the team members updating the posts with the latest rebates, workshops, testimonials and resources. Easy to follow forms and an accordion-style FAQ page rounded out the site along with images of projects that have happened in the CRD.
The 2022 rebrand followed the same process and strategy as the intial site, using the new colours and branding within the clean and easy to navigate site. Some new community-specific pages were added and our developers ensured that the site would still be easy for the City Green team to work with.
The end-product is a beautiful and informative website that logically walks homeowners in different municipalities through a wide variety of options available to them to improve their home energy efficiency and even redeem incentives for completing their projects.
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