New Website for Virginia Winery

Elevage Digital recently built a new website for Jump Mountain Vineyard, incorporating modern best practices for website accessibility and SEO.

The Challenge: Outdated Website Design

Jump Mountain Vineyard is located in Rockbridge County, VA, and creates wines from French, Italian, and Austrian variety grapes. They have won a number of awards for their wines, including the 2023 Shenandoah Cup for their Borderland wine. They have been the subject of several reviews and blog posts by local and regional wine writers. With all of this visibility, they needed an updated website that reflects their quality.

The previous website design was dated and was built from a WordPress theme that was no longer supported. The theme was so out-of-sync with the current state of WordPress that components were visibly broken on the homepage.

The Solution: A Modern, Easy-to-Update Website

Elevage Digital created a new, responsive, easy-to-update website using a blocks-based theme to keep up with the direction of the WordPress platform. We did not want something that would quickly become obsolete. We also focused on improving website accessibility and SEO.

Website Accessibility

Elevage Digital follows Website Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) when building websites. As part of this project, we worked with the Jump Mountain Vineyard color palate to make sure links, buttons, text, etc. meet minimum color contrast requirements for accessibility. We carried the color contrast through to the hover and focus states for interactive elements.

We used the Kadence theme and Kadence blocks to create a site that has accessibility best practices built into the base code. We did extensive testing with keyboards and screen readers to make sure the site is as usable as possible for as many people as possible.

Lastly, we installed Accessibility Checker to provide Jump Mountain Vineyard with tools to monitor accessibility as they create and edit content on their site.

*note: we cannot control any changes made after launch that change the accessibility and WCAG conformance of the website.

Website SEO

Elevage Digital included standard SEO best practices as part of the process of creating the new website content for Jump Mountain Vineyard. We made sure keywords were used appropriately to define the information architecture and content. We installed RankMath to help manage metadata and settings for their sitemaps. We built internal links between a number of the sites to help with usability and discoverability.

As part of the project, we set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track site engagement and search metrics.