Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm

The project

2020 was both a tough and a weird year. With all the lockdowns, restrictions, and guidance, it made sense to get Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm up and running with an e-commerce site.

The original site was sat on a Wordpress installation and had several issues we'd need to attend to. Firstly, it needed to be migrated to a secure, fast and reliable e-commerce platform. Wordpress is known to be full of security issues, and isn't designed to be an e-commerce platform.

Secondly, there was no consistent or simple way to find the correct opening hours and dates, or contact details and address information. It was split between carousel slides, site header, contact page, location page and several callout blocks throughout most page that weren't consistently located. This type of information should be really easy to find.

Our aims

• Assess navigation and page structure
• Improve mobile and tablet experience
• Migrate site to Shopify platform
• Brand new design across the site
• Make it accessible
• Assist with technical bits and bobs
• Help with missing content pages
• Newsletter campaigns creation
• Update site photography at the start of the new festive season
• Make contact and location information easy to find and consistent.

There were also accessibility concerns that we'd need to address: Keyboard navigation, heading and content issues, colour usage and information consistency across the site all had to be considered.

Having not sold online before, and being incredibly busy in the build up to Christmas, we offered our expertise in many areas to lighten the load - not only in design and build of their new site, but also in getting things behind the scenes set up (the technical 'bits and bobs'), like automation, social media, newsletters, payment accounts, photography, copy creation, and many re-assuring words along the way!

We wanted to not only improve the general quality and experience of the site, but also the 'feel' of it. We did a little digging into other online tree retailers and found them to be very 'business-y' and 'same-y'. This didn't feel right to us. The Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm experience is a bit more family, fun and friendly and we wanted the new site to reflect that while still maintaining a high quality feel and trustworthy experience.

The first things we did to address this was select an appropriate colour palette and choose a fun typeface that was still easily readable. We chose a combination of reds and greens to bring out that Christmas feel on the site.

Colour palettes

Colour accessibility

We tried to ensure we didn't leave anybody out, and the colour combinations we've used across the site should also be colour blind friendly. Ever wondered what that looks like?

Well, wonder no more! With the wonders of modern technology it's easy to check that the colours you've chosen work for the widest possible range of people...

Tech used

• Hosted e-commerce by Shopify
• Template language using Liquid
• CSS transformations with PostCss
• Front end build tasks with Gulp
• Code stored on GitHub

Festively chuffed!

We're really pleased with what we've put in place so far. Cheryl and Martin can now sell their wares online, can easily add more products in the future, and have loads of flexibility too.

Shopify provides so many great little features, such as the option for order collection, local delivery (with handy app for shop owners to help plan delivery routes!), messaging, social media integrations and much more too. We can keep expanding Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm's offering as soon as they're ready to do so.

• Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm
• Woolley Edge Christmas Tree Farm on Facebook