From a Wix brochure to a farm that runs its own website
Cherry Acres is a family-run farm in northwest Bakersfield — a pumpkin patch in the fall, Christmas on the Farm in December, and events in between. Its old Wix site was a pretty brochure that left out the things a visitor actually needs: no hours, no prices, no event dates, no ticket links, no FAQ, and nothing in Spanish, with parties and vendor sign-ups scattered across a Linktree. We rebuilt it by hand as a site the farm runs itself — one that knows what season it is, tells you if the gates are open, and gives families a reason to come back before, during and after the visit.
One site, three seasons, zero manual switching
The whole site re-dresses itself by date — colours, hero artwork, headline, the pop-up surprises, even the status badge. Fall is the pumpkin-patch look, spring turns pastel for Easter, and December becomes Christmas on the Farm. Tap through the three.
Pick your patch.
Fall. The pumpkin-patch look — warm oranges, leaves you can scatter, and a dusk mode where the jack-o’-lanterns start to glow.
A live preview of the three looks — the real site animates each one on the farm’s homepage.
Add a season in one place
A single PHP map resolves today’s date to one of three seasons and drives everything downstream: the colours, the hero artwork and headline, the ticker, the pop-up surprises, the Patch Passport, the photo-frame colours and the status badge. Easter follows the calendar on its own — the site calculates Easter Sunday for any year and shows the spring look from four weeks before through Easter Monday.
The owners control it from Admin › Themes: date ranges per look, which one shows “the rest of the year,” on/off per season, even ranges that cross New Year. A colour bar shows the whole year at a glance, and if two looks overlap, Christmas beats Easter and Easter beats Fall. And it’s motion-safe by default — effects stop for anyone who asks their device to reduce motion.
- Date-driven theming
- Easter auto-calculated
- Owner-controlled ranges
- Motion-safe by default
A badge that always knows if the gates are open
The number-one question a seasonal attraction gets is “are you open right now?” So a live status pill sits at the top of the homepage, worked out in Pacific time so it’s right for a visitor in any time zone. It reads the season dates and closed days from the admin, refreshes every minute, and runs the same rules on the server — so Google sees the correct answer too.
Weekly hours are Monday to Thursday 4–8 pm, Friday 4–9 pm, Saturday 9 am–9 pm and Sunday 9 am–7 pm, closed October 31, last wagon ride at 7 pm. The badge turns all of that into one plain sentence, before anyone has to call or message.
What the badge says
- Open now · until 9 pm
- Opens today at 4 pm
- Closed for tonight · opens Saturday 9 am
- 2 days until opening day!
The farm website kids actually want to play on
Families are the customer, so the site earns repeat visits with things to do — on the couch before the trip, in the truck on the way, and at the kitchen table after. All of it works in Spanish too.
A checklist for the visit
Eight badges a season — “get through the corn maze,” “feed a farm animal” — that kids tap off at the farm, with progress saved on the phone. Then a photo-frame maker wraps their picture in the Cherry Acres design and the badges they earned; the photo never leaves the phone.
Zombie bus, sleigh ride & surprises
A Zombie Paintball Bus you tap to fire at goofy zombies with a live “splatted” counter; pop-up pumpkins, eggs and ornaments that peek in from the edges to catch; and at Christmas, a 40-second Santa’s Sleigh Ride catch game. All hand-built on Canvas, no game engine.
Advent doors & a Nice List
A 24-door Advent calendar where one door opens each day in Pacific time — future doors can’t be peeked, even in the page code — plus a Nice List certificate kids fill in and print.
Nine originals, print or on-screen
Nine original line drawings, three per season — a solvable corn maze, “Decorate the Eggs,” “Deck the Tree.” Print them at letter size, or colour on screen with 14 crayons, tap-to-fill, undo and zoom, then save the picture. “Coloring” earned its own spot in the main menu.
What the old Wix site was missing
The old site looked fine and still left visitors guessing. Here is what a family actually needed — and now has.
No hours, no prices, no dates
The brochure had activities and a photo gallery but none of the basics for planning a trip. The rebuild puts hours, prices, the event calendar and the live open/closed badge front and centre.
Tickets lived somewhere else
Ticketing sat on SimpleTix behind a Linktree. Now every event carries its own ticket button in place — the tickets are still handled by SimpleTix, just linked cleanly instead of hunted for.
Nothing for Google to read
No structured data, no FAQ, and a generic page title. The new site carries full schema, a real FAQ, and a season-aware title built around “Bakersfield pumpkin patch” (see below).
English only in a bilingual town
Bakersfield has a large Spanish-speaking community and the old site had no Spanish at all. The rebuild is fully bilingual — 560 phrases, events, newsletters and games all included.
An admin a farmer can run from the truck
Sixteen admin pages, grouped and mobile-friendly, so the family changes what matters without calling a developer.
The farm at a glance
New requests, photos waiting to approve, visitors today, mailing-list size, what the site is showing right now, and quick actions — the first screen every morning.
Upload, tag, approve, schedule
Multi-upload photos auto-rotate and convert to WebP with location data stripped, tagged by season, with an approval queue for pictures visitors send in. Events add, hide or edit themselves off the site after their date, each with its own ticket link and optional Spanish blurb.
Write once, send to the right list
Compose with a live phone/desktop preview, send a test, then send to English or Spanish subscribers with one-click unsubscribe and “send again.” Party, field-trip and delivery requests land in an inbox and the owners’ email, and Reply goes straight to the visitor.
Cookie-free numbers, locked down
Visitors, views, referrers, devices, language, time of day, 32 tracked buttons and sign-ups — counted with a daily-changing hash, so it needs no cookie banner and identifies no one. Underneath: CSRF protection, rate-limited login, private folders blocked, and spam traps on every public form.
Built to rank for “Bakersfield pumpkin patch”
Season-aware, keyword-first
The title is “Bakersfield Pumpkin Patch & Corn Maze | Cherry Acres,” and it changes with the season — “Christmas on the Farm in Bakersfield” in December, “Easter on the Farm” in spring — with the keyword in the H1 above the fun headline “Pick your patch.”
Events, offers & a matching FAQ
LocalBusiness and TouristAttraction schema with address, amenities and social profiles; an Event for the pumpkin season with real ticket offers and one for every upcoming event; and an FAQPage that mirrors the visible FAQ.
Sitemap, hreflang, canonicals
A dynamic image sitemap, robots.txt, hreflang for English and Spanish, canonical URLs, season-aware link-preview images, and an llms.txt summary for AI assistants — all driven by one SITE_URL setting, so the domain move is a one-line change.
Ask in person, capture online
A “leave us a review” section opens Google’s review box directly, alongside a wall of real Google quotes. Printed QR signs — one for reviews, one for the site, tagged so scans show up in Stats — turn a visit at the farm into traffic and reviews.
Also in scope
The engagement ran well past the website — the launch runway a family farm needs to open the gates.
Delivered alongside the site
- A coming-soon countdown page to launch day
- Instagram carousels — “coming soon” and “fun for kids”
- Styled QR codes & a printable review sign
- Zombie Paintball launch details & age rules
- Email through Resend from the farm’s domain
- Step-by-step DNS move off Wix
- A full Spanish version of everything
- A launch README for the owners
Hand-coded around how a family farm actually runs
No template, no page builder — every season, game and admin screen was designed around the real rhythm of the farm. The owners change what matters — dates, events, banners, photos, newsletters — without calling a developer, and families get a reason to visit the website again before, during and after the trip. If you run a farm, patch or seasonal business and want a site that works this hard, tell us about it.
- Hand-coded seasonal sites
- Owner admin & newsletters
- Bilingual (English/Spanish)
- Local SEO & structured data
- Ticketing & events
- Ongoing support & hosting