Online tool allows agencies to tailor website for their region

BATON ROUGE, La. - All of Louisiana's state and regional economic development agencies are now taking advantage of an online tool from Entergy's Louisiana utilities that gives the state maximum visibility in the competitive arena of site selection.

The Louisiana Site Selection Center website allows state, regional and local economic development agencies the opportunity to brand the site as their own using a customizable wrapper that provides end users with a seamless experience.

The customizable wrapper lets an economic development group create its own unique version of the website with features and functions tailored to that group's specific region or area. The wrapper enables the core functionality of the application to be leveraged by numerous economic development agencies at once.

Agencies using the wrapper are not charged any subscription, hosting or other annual fees and there's only a small one-time fee by an outside vendor to produce the initial wrapper. The use of the site to market sites and buildings is free to all users.

Entergy Louisiana's Site Selection Center website is one of the most comprehensive and innovative state site selection tools in the nation and is used as the official Site Selection Center by Louisiana Economic Development and 19 regional and local economic development organizations around the state. It features a buildings and sites database and GIS mapping application with demographic and business data, parish and community profiles and a geospatial data download portal to geographically analyze potential properties for new and expanding businesses.

"The Louisiana Site Selection Center has become vital to our business recruitment efforts," said Larry Henson, director of business intelligence at Louisiana Economic Development. "It is one of the key site selection tools on the LED website. LED now requires all regional economic development allies to submit property fliers from LSSC for proposed sites we send to clients. This allows us to provide consistent, informative and attractive site information in our prospect proposals. I think our allies and LED project managers would find it difficult to maintain our current level of success without LSSC."

Site Selection magazine, which just named Entergy one of the nation's top 10 utilities in economic development, specifically praised the Entergy Louisiana Site Selection Center website for its contribution to the company's economic development efforts. The site, created in 2009, had a 20 percent increase in visitors in 2012 - more than 287,000, an average of 785 visits per day.

"The Louisiana Site Selection Center website is a powerful tool that helps businesses make important decisions, and our team has been the driver in delivering such a tool for the state," said Ed Jimenez, vice president of commercial operations and economic development for Entergy's Louisiana utilities. "The world of economic development is an extremely competitive one. The ownership and investment we have made to the Louisiana Site Selection Center website keeps us positioned as a leader in the industry and provides our state, regional and local allies with a critical tool they need to help attract and locate projects and bring jobs to the state."

Entergy's Louisiana Site Selection website is located at LouisianaSiteSelection.com and is accessible through the Entergy website at entergy.com/laede.

Entergy''s Louisiana utility companies serve more than one million customers through the operating companies Entergy Louisiana, LLC and Entergy Gulf States Louisiana, L.L.C. With operations in southern, central and northeastern Louisiana, the companies are part of Entergy Corporation.

Entergy, which celebrates its 100th birthday this year, is an integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000 megawatts of electric generating capacity, including more than 10,000 megawatts of nuclear power, making it one of the nation's leading nuclear generators. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.8 million utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Entergy has annual revenues of more than $10 billion and approximately 15,000 employees.

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