Belle-Rive, an orchard concept

Belle-Rive is a concept. The orchard, the family and the address are made up. We built it to show what a website can do for a business that people visit in person and that changes with the seasons, and to try out the real-time 3D and motion work we've been moving into. You can open it here.

The questions a farm site has to answer

Nobody visits an orchard's website to read its history first. They want to know three things on a Saturday morning: is it open today, what's ready to pick right now, and how do I get there. Most farm and orchard sites bury all three under a slideshow, or answer them in a Facebook post from last September.

Belle-Rive puts the hours on the first screen, with an open-or-closed marker. The directions button sits in the top corner of every page. And each apple variety has its own entry with the dates it's ready (Melba from mid-August, McIntosh from early September, Cortland and Honey Gold later in the month), what it tastes like, and what it's good for. A family deciding which weekend to come can work it out without calling.

The motion

The site moves slowly, on purpose. The light and the scenes follow the seasons as you scroll, from blossom to harvest, and the pace is closer to a walk between rows of trees than to an app. It's built with Three.js and scroll-driven animation, the same approach we wrote about in We moved into Three.js.

The rule we hold ourselves to is that the motion never gets in the way of the answer. Every animation has a still version for people who turn motion off, the 3D loads after the page is already readable, and phones get a lighter version so the battery and the data plan survive.

Who this is for

Orchards and pick-your-own farms, sugar shacks in March, vineyards, Christmas tree farms, garden centres. Any business where the website's real job is to get a car into the parking lot on the right weekend. Bilingual, built for phones, and kept current by us so the dates and hours are never last year's.

If you run one, tell us about it. Sites start at $2,000 USD, and we'll tell you honestly whether the 3D is worth it for you or whether a fast, plain site does the job better.