Solene Estate, a family winery.

The drive is the whole problem

Nobody stumbles into a winery, and nobody stumbles into your place on Gull Lake either. They commit to a drive first. That decision happens on a phone, days ahead, and it comes down to four questions: is this worth the trip, are you open when I would come, exactly where is it, and can I hold a spot.

Every page on this site exists to answer one of those. If your site makes somebody hunt for your hours, some fraction of them just picks the place that did not.

Six pages instead of one long one

A single scrolling page is the right answer for plenty of businesses and the wrong one here. Somebody who already decided to come and just wants your address should land on a page that is only your address, your map and your hours. Making them scroll past the founding story to get it is a small insult repeated a few thousand times a season.

The parts that go stale, and who edits them

Hours, dates, the product list and the enquiry form all sit in one place to update. That matters more up here than almost anywhere, because your hours in July are not your hours in October, and a site where changing them means emailing your web guy is a site showing summer hours at Thanksgiving.

I would rather build it so you can change it in thirty seconds in the parking lot than sell you a support ticket every time the season turns.

No framework, so it opens on bad signal

The whole site is hand written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Every page renders completely even with JavaScript switched off, which also means it renders on an old phone, on resort wifi shared by forty people, and for the search engine deciding where to put you.

The bottles are drawn as vectors rather than photographed, so they stay sharp at any size and cost almost nothing to load.

Accessibility, which is not an upgrade

Keyboard support throughout, every form field labelled properly, and animation that turns itself off if the visitor's device asks. The automated audit finds zero issues on every page.

A meaningful share of the people planning a lake trip are older, and plenty of them are using bigger text, a screen reader, or one thumb. A site that fights them is a booking that goes somewhere else, and for a business open to the public it is a real legal exposure too.