Season Cellars

Season Cellars is a winery located in beautiful Southern Oregon. They specialize in Southern Oregon grape varietals for their wines, and have numerous awards with WinePress NW, Oregon Wine Awards, SavorNW Wine Awards, and many more.

When I approached Season Cellars about their previous website, they understood that it had its pitfalls. It felt as though they had to work to make their website useful instead of having a website that works for them. It was also last edited sometime around 2012 through Google Sites.

My clients' previous website was dramatically outdated and did not serve them well. They wanted a website that would better represent their brand, increase their Wine Club membership, and incorporate a way for customers to find where their wines are located locally.

Goals/Requirements: • Establish brand colors, typography, and voice • Showcase their available wines and where to find them • Increase Wine Club membership intake

My preferred CMS is Wordpress with the Elementor Pro page builder. I feel as though Elementor is superior to other Wordpress page builders (like wpbakery and Gutenberg).

Photos not owned by Season Cellars are from unsplash.com.

Hosting provided by Siteground.

Competitors 🛸 What I did first was look up my clients' local competitors to compare how they use their website. I found that all 5 of the competitors I viewed had very similar layouts and menu order. This could be because all wineries prioritize the "new customer" experience on their websites. A description of who they are is front and center, the Wine Club link is high on the menu list, and each have established branding so no winery looks the same.

Mockups 💻 I went through two revisions of mockups via Adobe XD for Season Cellars after finding a typography font that matched their original logo, and laying out their brand colors. You can view the Adobe XD mockup in the link here.

Wine Finder 👁️ Probably the most difficult aspect to figure out for this web project was the Wine Finder. WordPress does not currently offer any reputable plugin that allow the capability to apply location finder to a map API. Astra was an ideal API that I looked into in the mockup phase, but my clients and I didn't know if its cost was worth being out of budget for the project. This is still currently a WIP on the live site, though we are close to finding a program that works best for us.

Wine Club & Recipes 🍷 The previous website did not showcase Season Cellars Wine Club options. I wanted this in particular to have multiple touch-points and call-to-actions that would lead the user back to the Wine Club (WC). First of all, there is a designated section on the front page that directs to the WC. I also had the idea of incorporating a Recipes & Pairings page that would include some recipes from the Wine Club newsletters. This will not only reference the WC, but also improve Season Cellars' overall SEO.

It's always super satisfying when the completed and launched website matches the carefully planned mockup exactly. You can view the website from the link below:

This project really solidified for me that Elementor is one of the best page-builders for Wordpress out there. I've worked with Gutenberg before and it is without a doubt inferior to Elementor Premium's capabilities, especially when it comes to designing for mobile.

I hope that Season Cellars enjoys their new website now that they've outgrown Google Sites, and I look forward to continued work with them. 😊