Christmas Tree Farm Storytelling
I interviewed them to get an idea of their business process and what it was that they uniquely offered to customers, especially in a region with many Christmas tree farms. I made several trips to the farm on the opening week, so I could take photographs and video of the business in action. I then created the website as a collection of stories.
The first story a visitor sees is the home page slide show. The story it tells is succinct: Welcome, we have good trees, a family business, you can cut your own or buy pre-cuts, our staff will help. There are train and hay rides and Santa and animals, a gift shop, snack bar and picnic area. Come back again next year. Here are the slides:
I took photographs purposefully, to illustrate a story, to make the Christmas tree experience real, colorful and appealing and used them liberally throughout the site. Except on the home page, with its slide show, where a brief background story introduced you to the farm and a bullet list quickly outlined what you could expect:
The site is constructed upon a versatile WordPress theme that is mobile-responsive. When viewed on a phone or other small screen device, the stories reflow in a way that makes sense. The two examples pages below, with about a dozen photos apiece (and all the pages, actually) will launch into an overlay slide show when any of the photos are clicked. Each of the photos are titled with a sentence that adds to the story plus contains key phrases for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Maybe you don’t know what to expect, cutting your first Christmas tree. After interviewing the owners and observing (and photographing) the process, I constructed a story page that illustrated the process of getting your Christmas tree.
People like to know about the gift shop and the snack bar, so we tell that story too (pictured here) as well as other pages describing the rides and attractions at the farm.