A family-owned winery in Calistoga, California, Frank Family Vineyards puts people first, wanting to make visitors feel part of its day-to-day experience. Understanding that desire, digital agency FINE built a new site for the winery around its daily operations—beginning with an interactive, twelve-hour time lapse animated background on the homepage. Concocted with a witch’s brew of video and codec configurations in order to get the files to preload and scrub quickly on all major browsers, the animated background loads dependent on the position of the visitors’ cursors; as they wave their cursors horizontally over the background, the time changes accordingly. 

When it comes to customer experiences, Frank Family Vineyards has a slow-life philosophy: visitors should enjoy family and fine wine and feel connected to the winery’s sense of place. FINE communicated this in the site design by prioritizing approachability and warmth, emphasizing the family behind the wine. Drop caps, big chapter headers and two-column content blocks keep these feelings alive throughout the site. Immersive photography illustrates the brand’s natural simplicity and introduces visitors to the winery’s staff, so before they even visit, they’ll feel as though they have already met them.