The challenge
Southridge Country Store is a family-owned grocer on Port Washington Road on Pender Island, run by Amanda and Rob. Amanda is a trained chef, and she and her team make the soups, sandwiches, dips and take-home dinners sold under the store’s own label, Amanda’s Recipe. Around that are specialty cheeses and charcuterie, organic produce, a pantry of hard-to-find things, and the work of 29 suppliers, from farms and bakers to roasters and makers, six of them on Pender. Picnic Park is next door, and in summer so is the store’s own food truck, Warthog’s Burritos.
Visitors kept telling them the same thing on the last day of their holiday: they wished they had known about the store sooner. Amanda wanted a site that reaches people before they get on the ferry. She wanted it simpler, cleaner and easy to take in on a phone, with everything she might need to change, from the hours to what’s in season, in her own hands. And the store’s email, on the same domain, had to stay exactly where it was.
What I built
Five pages and a blog, written for someone planning a trip. The homepage opens on the store’s own badge on its sky blue, with the hours, the phone number and directions from the ferry on the first screen, and a note for weekend visitors: the store is closed Sundays, so stock up on Friday or Saturday. A line at the top of every page says whether the store is open right now. The badge’s tree line runs across the page, and as you scroll the badge settles behind it.
Under it are four ways in, in the order visitors ask about them: what’s made in the store, cheese and charcuterie, stocking up for the stay, and Picnic Park.
Made In House has a page and colours of its own, after the Amanda’s Recipe label: when the sandwiches, the soup of the day and the frozen dinners are on, where to find each one in the store, and what’s in the fridge.
In the Store walks the thirteen aisles, from the produce corner to the candy counter and the livestock feed in the front room. Each aisle names the suppliers Amanda works with directly, and the page closes on all 29 of them together, with the Pender Island ones marked.
Some of it changes with the seasons, and the site changes with it, on its own. Picnic Park shows as open from May to September and closed for the season the rest of the year. Warthog’s Burritos gets its own band on the homepage from July 1 to Labour Day, worked out fresh each year. Holiday Mondays show as closed. Visit has the week’s hours day by day, and the drive from the Otter Bay ferry: about 4.5 km and seven minutes, drawn from OpenStreetMap as you scroll, with the turns written out beside it.
Every address from the old site forwards to its new page, down to the right aisle, so links already in Google still land somewhere useful.
The result
The site went live on southridgeonpenderisland.com on October 16. The store’s email didn’t move; only the web address was pointed at the new site.
That evening Amanda logged in, corrected a few lines on the homepage and in the aisles, and published the store’s first blog post herself: fall things to do around Port Washington, from the winter market at the community hall to the shops down at Hope Bay. It went up on the homepage without me touching anything. Every photo on the site is a field in the same dashboard, so the store’s new photographs go in the same way.
“This is amazing. I really like how you took this and cleaned it right up. Relevant and to the point.”
— Amanda, Southridge Country Store
