Good Energy

Bringing nothing but good energy to Good Energy’s new website

Image of the Good Energy homepage

Project overview

Good Energy were one of the UK’s first 100% renewable electricity suppliers, driven by a mission to power a cleaner, greener world. With a mission so closely aligned with our own, we were delighted to work with the team in 2021 to create their new domestic website.

Good Energy have gone to considerable lengths to raise awareness of greenwashing, so it was important too for their website to raise awareness of digital carbon emissions. Their new website reflects this with an impactful, colourful design, and is, of course, powered by 100% renewable energy.

Features

  • Low carbon site design
  • Custom charts with subtle animations
  • Interactive maps
  • Storytelling components

0.58g

CO2 per homepage view

100%

Lighthouse Accessibility score

1.2s

Page load time

Low carbon site design

Taking the existing brand palette for Good Energy, we refreshed the site design, softening the look and feel of the site with curved lines and subtle images representing the energy sources that Good Energy uses.

Displaying a page from the Good Energy website, with subtle yellow curved design highlighting images displayed on one of the 'Learn' pages of the website

We used accents and splashes of the bold yellow palette to highlight the focus of Good Energy’s mission – to be part of the climate crisis’ solution.

An important goal of this project was to move Good Energy’s domestic site to a green host. Previously, their website had been powered by bog standard energy. The new site, however, runs on 100% sustainable energy, and each page has a low carbon footprint. To raise awareness of this, we included our Website Carbon badge in the footer.

Image showing the website carbon scores of Good Energy (green) vs Ecotricity (red) side by side

It’s unfortunate that ecotricity.co.uk is powered by fossil fuels rather than sustainable energy. It’s important that climate-focused organisations take stock of their digital carbon footprint—particularly energy companies. If your site is receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, the grams of CO2 per page view begin to add up.

Custom charts with subtle animations

To demonstrate Green Energy’s credentials, we created dynamic charts to show their 100% renewable fuel mix, compared to the UK’s average. As these figures will change over time, we made these charts fully customisable from within WordPress, so that the Good Energy team can easily update them as and when needed. 

Image showing a chart representing the type of energy Good Energy uses

We added subtle animations to the charts, which initially show a visual representation of percentages only, but reveal the numbers when you hover over each part of the chart.

Interactive maps

To highlight further information about Good Energy’s electricity sources, we created two interactive maps. The first map shows Good Energy’s own solar and wind farms across the UK.

This map shows the detail of each energy farm on hover.

 

Image of a map of the UK (south), showing the details of an energy farm in the area

The second map shows all the generators that they buy energy from across the UK, with further detail of the number and type of generator displayed for each area.

 

Image of a black map of the UK, highlighted yellow in the areas that Good Energy has generators (as at Dec 2021)

Clear, friendly user journeys

Being a business to consumer website, it was important that we followed best practices for user experience. We undertook a thorough discovery process with a wide range of stakeholders to get to the heart of what Good Energy’s domestic consumers need from their site. One of the direct outputs was a cleaner, simpler information architecture. 

This provided a strong blueprint for Good Energy’s content team to write new content ahead of the site launch—and get rid of some old, superfluous content. In addition to making it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for, this has an additional benefit of bringing the website’s carbon footprint down. Fewer pages means fewer kilobytes. Good for people and the planet.

Celebrating the launch

It’s been a long time since we’ve had the pleasure of meeting our clients face-to-face. To celebrate the launch of Good Energy’s new site, we were so pleased to be invited down to their offices in Chippenham. Here’s a photo of (nearly) the whole team, in front of Luke Jerram’s captivating globe installation at the Good Energy offices.

Image of the Wholegrain and Good Energy teams standing together in front of a giant globe at Good Energy's offices