One of my very favorite plant nurseries in the Portland area is Xera Plants. They’ve had a web presence for a very long time, but it was difficult to manage and not easily navigable. So we did a ground-up rebuild in WordPress, where the focus of the site is on the extensive catalog of plants that Xera grows. There’s no e-commerce or online ordering because Xera is a retail-only in-person shop, but the search and filter functions are the heart of the site. You want plants that have silver leaves and don’t need to be watered? No problem!
Each plant is entered into the website once, and then will automatically appear in a multitude of searches and lists based on the metadata attached to the plant, which you can see in the following screenshot: The family, the type of plant, where it grows, what it needs in terms of sun exposure, and so on. Our goal was to make this site useful for both gardeners and garden designers to find and select the right plants for their gardens.
One of Xera’s goals as a company is to elevate knowledge among the gardening public about not just the plants they grow and sell, but about horticulture in general and specifically what it means to do gardening in the great Pacific Northwest, which is both a wonderful climate and a weird climate. Co-owner Paul Bonine is an encyclopedia of horticultural knowledge, and this site allows his writing to be much more accessible to all.
As of this posting, the site is barely a month old, and already Xera’s customers have been saying wonderful things about how useful the site is and that it’s fun to spend time on it. We hope it just keeps getting better!
Visit the site: https://xeraplants.com