portfolio - Utility.com
As technical producer for Utility.com (the Internet's first utility company), I managed production for site described by Andersen Consulting as the "best performing website" following a survey of 144 utility companies' web sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Hong Kong. Working with a team of up to 13, I coordinated the efforts of designers, content providers, technical developers, database administrators, and quality assurance engineers. The site was written in ASP and ran primarily on a SQL Server database.
When I arrived at Utility.com, we were selling electricity in California and Pennsylvania. Over the course of my tenure, we expanded our electricity service to Massachusetts and added four additional services: Internet access, appliance service plans, DSL service, and long distance. There were also two major site redesigns and we restructured the database.
The success of our site prompted Utility.com to try to establish itself as an Application Service Provider. Working with the development team, we created the UtilityOneTM platform. For web presentation, we relied on a combination of Cascading Style Sheets (to vary, for example, fonts and colors) and database driven elements. We created a demonstration site for the fictional Suburban Gas and Electric. We relied upon the URL to identify how the site should be branded, so that the Suburban site was accessed by suburban.utility.com. This is, of course, old hat by now, but at the time, it was very sophisticated!
Besides the public customer interface, we developed a web-based Customer Service Representative (CSR) interface that could be used by both internal and external CSRs, as well as CSRs of our ASP clients.
Our first customer was a consortium of electricity coops that contracted to use our platform to sell long distance. We created a site that reflected their own branding as MyHomePower.com.
Our successes also prompted interest overseas, and the French utility company, Gaz de France, expressed interest in using the UtilityOneTM platform. We started work on a prototype site, expanding the platform to handle language localization, and even included both an Italian and an English version. (Unfortunately, Utility.com was dissolved before this site could go live.)
I also conducted onsite training in HTML and Javascript. Copies of my syllabi are available: Introduction to HTML and Introduction to Javascript.