By Tom Kleckner
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — SPP rolled out a flashy, redesigned website last week, culminating several years of effort and months of planning, development and testing.
Designed with non-RTO users in mind, the website adapts to the user’s screen size, from flat-screen monitors to tablets and smartphones. Its home page features a real-time price-contour map as well as graphs of generation mixes and load forecasts, all updated every five minutes.
“We laid out the site and organized the site with people other than subject-matter experts in mind,” SPP’s Derek Wingfield told the Markets and Operations Policy Committee last week. “It’s written in a way that’s understandable to them.”
Wingfield said links to frequently used business-critical pages are prominently displayed on the new home page: the Stakeholder Center, Engineering, Markets & Operations and Regional Entity.
Users will be able to create an account to simplify the meeting registration process. Once a user creates a profile, the user’s information is stored and auto-populated when signing up for conference calls or for online and in-person meetings.
However, only meeting registrations through mid-November will be carried over from the old site. Users will have to re-register for any meeting scheduled 30 days or more after the website’s Oct. 15 go-live date.
Wingfield said SPP has improved the website’s search functionality, calendar and document library, which were frequent targets of stakeholder criticism. SPP’s Tariff will still be available in its old format, but the Regulatory and Legal Group page has added a “Notable FERC Filings” link to better sort regulatory dockets.
A link has been added to the home page that explains the new website’s layout and major features.
