Established by Dave Wilson in 1938 on a small piece of rented ground near Modesto, California, the company has grown to become one of the largest growers of fruit, nut, and shade trees in the United States. The growing grounds are located east of Modesto in the Sierra Nevada foothills, near the town of Hickman. Dave Wilson Nursery grows trees for both commercial orchards and the home garden trade.
Byer Company was introduced to Dave Wilson Nursery in 2020 to bring their web presence into modern standards. The digital marketing strategy included a complete rebuild of their popular website, designing assets featuring their updated logo, and developing a backend app to handle product updates and content management. The challenge was to keep almost 1000 pages of pre-existing content that is popular with their community, while maintaining and increasing their search engine visibility.
The original Dave Wilson website was built on an obsolete version of the Drupal platform. Since an upgrade was not cost effective, we started with a fresh and modern technology stack. We built the website as a static web app which increased performance, stability, and security. We built a content management system for managing content, and we built a web app for uploading products to sync with their in-house inventory system.
Dave Wilson Nursery has 3 specific audiences to take into consideration: commercial growers, retail nurseries, and home garden consumers. Byer Company developed a microsite strategy to tailor the web experience to each audience individually. From the homepage, users will select one of three buttons that will lead them to an audience-specific web experience. Content such and news, products, and sales contacts will be different based on the microsite users visit.
Byer developed an app to streamline the process of updating products on the website. The products are constantly changing, and the in-house inventory system did not offer an external API connection. Our solution was created to optimize efficiency and deal with the lack of full automation as smoothly as possible. Based on a product export from the in-house system, we were able to scrape and reformat the details to display on the website. If images were not available for the product, we would fall back to a general image appropriate for the category.