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Calpine Corporation has been a leader in the energy industry for decades. In 2022, company leadership recognized the need for a refreshed online presence, partnering with PLUS Communications to bring the website up-to-date and better reflect their leading industry presence.
Over two years, PLUS worked closely with the Calpine team to reconstruct its website from the ground up. The result: a website that reflects Calpine’s leadership in the power industry while effectively engaging key audiences, including current and potential employees, prospective customers, investors and others.
The PLUS team first tackled visual interface upgrades, incorporating images and video footage shot on-site at Calpine’s facilities to showcase the corporation’s role in the energy sector. PLUS’ web development team designed a fully-interactive custom map to allow site visitors to explore the nationwide Calpine portfolio based on facility type, geography, and other parameters, highlighting the breadth of Calpine’s operations both informatively and engagingly.
Concurrently, PLUS constructed the site’s backend to enable Calpine’s internal team to efficiently maintain their web presence, securing long-term manageability. Utilizing custom code, PLUS built the site on the WordPress CMS system, allowing maximum customization while preserving ease-of-use for less technologically-savvy users. Custom roles and capabilities were also created for internal Calpine use, with different levels of site access enabled.
Google Analytics was integrated to meet Calpine’s analytics needs. The analytics dashboard enables the Calpine team to monitor a range of data points – visitor origin, time on site overall, time on pages and more – in a digestible, centralized format. From this dashboard, performance can be used to optimize individual site pages over time.
A custom plug-in was created by the PLUS web development team to address the need for an embedded social feed, automatically pulling the latest posts from Calpine’s X account in real-time. This integration leverages the X API to ensure the feed updates dynamically, maintaining synchronization with Calpine’s social media activity. The design team also aligned the visual presentation of the feed with Calpine’s branding, ensuring it felt like a natural extension of the site.
To improve investor security, PLUS enhanced the existing investor portal by developing a “magic link” process. Calpine investors now receive a dedicated one-time use link via email for portal registration and each login thereafter – eliminating the need for routine password changes. This magic link process is further utilized when sending investment resource updates, pairing an individual login link with the email notification to each investor that new resources have been posted.
Upon launch, the website was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from investors and stakeholders, praising the visual appeal, ease of use and upgraded features. Site performance skyrocketed: in the month immediately following launch, site traffic increased by 1,135 percent as compared to the prior thirty days, garnering an average of 2,026 views daily. Total page sessions, numbering 2,827 in the month prior to release, shot up to 58,024 in the thirty days after the site went public.
Overall, Calpine’s site now effectively serves the company’s diverse audiences, showcases its energy portfolio and facilitates meaningful interactions with investors, employees and the general public – a feat befitting of an industry innovator.
Nomination Title: Energized Innovation: Calpine Site Redesign
