The AAS Winner Brand
All-America Selections is an independent nonprofit that trials and judges new flower and vegetable varieties each year. Plants that demonstrate superior performance and uniqueness earn the AAS Winner designation and are supported with promotion to home gardeners. The AAS Winners website helps the public select the best proven plant varieties for their gardens and supports the wholesalers and the retailers who sell them.
What prompted the need for a new website?
The previous website was created by Verve ten years earlier. The decision to create a new site was prompted by 2 things.
1. In 2024, All-America Selections merged with the National Garden Bureau (NGB). As a program now under that parent nonprofit, the client desired an updated site that would help bridge the gap and make it look more connected to NGB while still retaining distinct branding.
2. The ten-year-old site had reached the limit of minor updating and was in need of more significant technical and functional improvements to create a better user experience.
What we did: Evolved brand look and upgraded functionality
With the existing content as a base, Verve designed a new site with sky’s the limit possibility for design and functionality. The most dramatic change was new functionality that made the plant search—the core of the site—much more practical in helping visitors narrow down AAS Winners using multi-faceted search with “and” logic that allows visitors to narrow results. Visitors can now find a select list of plant with multiple factors important to them such as type (annuals, perennials, vegetables), region, AAS Winners by year, good as cut flowers, pollinator-friendly, and more. With hundreds of AAS Winners going back to 1933, this created a dramatically more helpful experience.
The site was redesigned with a new brand look. Visually, the design moves toward the green palette of the parent National Garden Bureau while still keeping a nod to the previous red, white and blue through the AAW winner logo.
With 650+ pages on the previous site, it was also important that all content be as seamlessly imported into the new design as possible. In particular, we were able to program the import of a variety of pieces of information on each plant into new sections of the new plant page design. And associated retailers—different for each of the hundreds of plants—was able to be imported programmatically.
Key Technical Stats:
• 650+ page site; 6000+ images and documents.
• Custom WordPress theme development with WPBakery page builder for easy updates by internal staff.
• Advanced migration of content from the old site in text imported to appear in backend fields in the new design.
• Custom programming to automate import of retailer links different on each plant page.
• Custom programming that now allows retailers to directly change and manage the links to individual plant pages and have them automatically populate to the frontend site.
• Gated login areas created for non-public content such as AAS judges and garden industry partners.
• 52 DA
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