With over a thousand specialty plants for sale, Singing Tree Gardens is a true gem of the North Coast. Their previous site was over a decade old and struggling to keep pace. The founder Don Wallace tasked us with creating a cleaner, simpler experience to retain his current clientele while also expanding the business’s reach to the next generation.
Our solution was to tackle this task with a complete overhaul, purposefully designed for the simplicity of visitors experience and for those managing the site, in addition to rediscovering the visual identity of Singing Tree Gardens. Within months of the new site and identity going public, traffic is up and sales have matched the growth.
Experience it for yourself.
Explore Singing Tree Gardens
Case Study Synopsis
Over a decade old, their cold-fusion based website framework was bloated, unwieldy, and in need of security updates to keep pace with the industry. Their visual identity consisted of dated imagery that represented the business quality inconsistently.
Research, strategy, information architecture, user interface design, and responsive development for increased user accessibility. Revitalized visual identity, front-end and back-end programming developed customized content management systems. Ecommerce platform setup and deployment.
Seamless sales funnels, increased user accessibility, and robust content management systems that capitalize on Shopify’s powerful ecommerce tools and Drupal’s customization, grants access to previously lost revenue streams. Coupled with the refreshed identity that provides a powerful indication of quality and origin, Singing Tree Gardens new platform will tackle the next decade.
Indicators of success - 21 months post launch
2017 sales matched the entirety of 2016 in under 7 months.
2017 annual sales rose 69% compared to 2016.
2018 visitors from Jan-July compared to 2017 is up 184%
Weighted Average for sales increase from 2016 - 2017 per month is 117.8%.
Sales in 2018 increased by 158% compared to 2016.
Our redesigned Newsletter template increased the value of the newsletter marketing by 32.78%
Our Dynamic Newsletter System increased Email Marketing Signups by 574%
Requests for out-of-stock products through our custom made system has surpassed 10,000
General contact submissions & inquiries jumped to over 470 in 21 months.
The second best selling product is "the starter kit" - a brainstormed product from our client meeting.
Singing Tree Gardens is ranked #1 on Google for "Rhododendrons for sale" & "Dwarf Conifers for sale"
Google Analytics Stats: (old site vs new site)
Mobile usage Session Duration: 2.31mins vs 4mins
Desktop usage Session Duration: 3.48mins vs 6.10mins
All Users
Session Duration: 3:25mins vs 5:28mins
Bounce Rate: 49.79% vs 38.22%
People reaching final page on checkout process +17%
Less Tell, More Show
Plant’s sell themselves owing to their unique beauty. The new site’s designed to capitalize on the powerful and rich imagery of the flowers, displaying them large and proud. We stripped text away from key pathways allowing for bold and simple navigation for visitors.
We designed an extremely simple site void of clutter, encouraging visitors to migrate from section to section and plant to plant. Visits to the new site are up but more impressively the average time spent per-visit is over 5 minutes.
Crafting Seamless Simplicity
Simplicity in its truest form is something refined – stripped of surplus. With careful evaluation of existing platforms, and the demands of Singing Tree Garden’s visitors and staff, the best course of action was to create a seamless blend of Drupal’s based content management system, which provided both powerful control and customization, with Shopify’s robust ecommerce tools.
We focused on our efforts on a system that provided the best ROI, easiest content management, and maximum room for expansion and completion of the necessary business tools.
Custom Tools for Custom Needs
"We believe a well crafted site is more than simply a tool for marketing and sales, but a tool for business management."
Every business has individual needs, and Singing Tree Garden’s was no exception. We located the most fundamentally useful items for not only the visitors but to the business’s staff and developed them with ease of use being critical to their success. These custom-built content management tools consisted of:
Bulk editing ecommerce taxonomy displays
Out of stock notifications and direct reply systems
Quantity notifications for low stock products
Simplified Google Analytics Dashboards
By focusing on highest value added tools we were able to keep costs low, while maximizing the efficiency gains of the new system for both parties involved.
Exploring the Roots
Overhauling their visual identity was a delicate task. Desiring to not alienation faithful customers, but with a need to present a more mature and professional image to capture new generations, our path to redesigning Singing Tree’s Gardens visual identity started by rediscovering what made their business tick.
“Unique. Specialty. Plants.”
"Unique. Specialty. Plants
Infuse these three words with their founder’s passion for Japanese culture and what’s birthed is a potent combination of ancestry, elegance, and beauty. Our new identity, corner-stoned by the new logo and paired with carefully selected colors and fonts, provides visitors from McKinleyville and around globe with a truly unique and memorable experience.
Responsive is King
Over 65% of all searches come from mobile devices in 2016
Source - comScore
The experience is optimized to service everyone no matter the device they access Singing Tree Garden’s with. In developing the site to maximize user accessibility, gains can be found across the board for sales and SEO. The new platform will allow visitors to enjoy the site from their living room desktop to their smartphones in the gardens outside.
Crafted Today for Many Tomorrows.
Setting a New Benchmark
With this project we pushed rich menus farther than we have before with the goal of providing a contextual visual indication to help streamline navigation and create effective sales funnels. This site proved to be a perfect case of great content selling itself, all we needed to do was take a step back and leverage it.
The rich menu structure function’s intuitively, helping to encourage exploration of the site and products.
This project demonstrates that menus aren't simply for clicking but can act as crucial experience drivers for consumers.
Ecommerce & Developer Platform Blending
Shopify is a powerful platform for 95% of what typical ecommerce businesses need, but we needed to close to 5% gap, and achieved this by utilizing the Drupal as the core development platform.
For Singing Tree, we took advantage of:
Sales Reports
Orders & Payment Processing, PCI Compliance
Product Bulk-Editing
Combining Shopify with a custom-built site, allowed us to fill in the gaps:
Categorization & filtering by a dozen or more attributes, like color & bloom season.
Intricate In & Out of Stock Notifications for Customers
Rich Menus, that automatically populate content with minimal effort from Singing Tree.
Great Content Sings
In ecommerce, high quality content is everything.
Let the content do the talking. Let the images act as guides. It's well known that images attract attention before text, and with the new website we crafted the ecommerce layout to let the content do the heavy lifting.Singing Tree Gardens has found great success because the content is rock solid. This was only made possible through the combined efforts on our side, as well as the efforts of Don; who went out and gathered new photos, in addition to updating all of the content. This leveraged our new framework and displays to present a product to visitors that can literally sell itself.
Design & Content Philosophy
Maximum Value Added
Building this site, we emphasized maximum effect with minimum effort, a philosophy known as Maximum Value Added. This encompasses active decisions to cut loose items that could consume, delay or derail the project.
This philosophy was executed successfully in our content strategy. We determined that the best method for getting the site up, running, and generating revenue was to focus on the highest value added elements rather than tackle all of the extraneous elements that would delay ROI. This prompted us to develop a homepage design focused solely on products. Ultimately our client was able to capitalize on the new site significantly quicker and begin generating revenue.
What the customers are saying:
- "Still browsing your site. One of the great features is being able teo narrow the search choices."
- "Details make all the difference in the world."
- "Looking forward to Inspriation page. I'm getting cabin fever already."
- "Great new website. Good job. I like it. Easy to find plants."
- "I salute the person/people who built your site."
- "Just a comment... your website is fantastic!"
What the founder has to say:
"Our experience working with Evenvision has been great. This company has taken our website up several notches in both the aesthetic look, as well as how well it works. Their choice to use Shopify as the shopping cart back end has also been a big improvement. Our customers have an easy and clear shopping experience and we don’t have to try to ‘fix’ orders that didn’t go through well. We would recommend this company to anyone... "
—Don Wallace, Singing Tree Gardens
Read the rest of the testimonial here
