British Gas: putting a household name online

The client

British Gas, part of Centrica, is one of the most recognised household names in the UK. As the web became a mainstream service channel, the brand needed to carry that everyday trust into a digital experience its customers could rely on.

We delivered this work as the design team at NetDecisions / Agilisys. It began with British Gas's first online presence in the NetDecisions years from 1999, with the "House in Order" web work following in the Agilisys era.

The challenge

A utility serving millions of homes cannot treat the web as a brochure. British Gas needed an online presence that was clear, dependable and genuinely usable for a very broad, non-technical public, one that matched the reliability people expected from the service itself.

What we did

We designed and built web experiences for British Gas, including the "House in Order" work. Our job was to give a mass-market household brand a credible, usable home on the early web, at a time when few brands of this scale had one.

Our approach

We designed for the broadest possible audience: plain language, dependable interactions and navigation anyone could follow. This was the period when large consumer brands were defining what "being online" even meant for a utility, and every decision had to earn the trust the brand already held offline.

Outcome

The work helped establish British Gas online during the formative years of the web, giving one of the UK's most trusted household names a digital presence built to the same standard as the service behind it.

Context & coverage

British Gas was in the middle of a major reinvention at the time. The old business had demerged in 1997, and the consumer arm under Centrica was diversifying hard: it launched the Goldfish credit card and bought The AA in July 1999 for around 1.1 billion pounds, all while the dot-com era pushed every household brand to establish itself online. Putting British Gas on the web sat squarely in that push to turn a utility into a broader consumer-services brand.

• Centrica company history and Centrica plc history: 1997 demerger, Goldfish, AA acquisition and early diversification.