Pinewood Christmas Trees
Over 50,000 Trees Lovingly Nurtured
Moving a seasonal Christmas tree business off WordPress and onto a static build, with a structure designed around how people actually shop for a tree.
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Tree #021911
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Berry #c31919
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Mint #8ee4c6
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Forest #417c68
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Sage #d3e6e0
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Foam #fafffd
I worked with Pinewood Christmas to transform their old WordPress site into something brighter, clearer, and far easier for customers to enjoy. Instead of a dated, hard-to-navigate layout, I focused on giving the site a fresh structure, cleaner navigation, and a set of new brand elements, including simple, friendly icons, that bring a bit of character to every page. Behind the scenes, the entire build was rebuilt for modern browsers, making everything load faster and feel far more polished. The result is a website that feels organised, welcoming, and genuinely helpful at a time of year when people just want things to be simple and stress-free.
The Challenge
Pinewood grow over 50,000 trees, but a website selling them has an unusual shape to it. Most of the year is quiet, and then a few weeks arrive where almost all of the traffic turns up at once.
That changes what the site has to do. Someone visiting in early December is not browsing. They have four or five specific questions in mind, mostly around what is available, what it costs, where to go, and when the place is open. If they cannot answer those quickly they will go somewhere else, because there is always another farm down the road and no time to spare.
The existing WordPress site was working against that. It had aged, the navigation had grown awkward, and the pages took longer to load than they needed to.
The Approach
The first decision was to move off WordPress entirely and rebuild as a static site. For a business with a hard seasonal peak that is the right call, because a static site handles a sudden surge in visitors without breaking a sweat and has no database sitting there waiting to fall over on the busiest weekend of the year.
With the technical side settled I restructured the content around those few questions people actually arrive with, and rebuilt the navigation so the answers are never more than a click away.
I also introduced a set of new brand elements, including a simple, friendly icon set. Buying a Christmas tree should feel like a nice thing to do, and the design needed to carry a bit of that warmth rather than reading like a product catalogue.
The Result
The site is quicker, easier to move around, and considerably more pleasant to look at than the one it replaced.
More to the point, it holds up when it matters. Everything a customer needs is close to hand during the short window where the business does most of its trade, which is exactly when a slow or confusing website costs the most.
