The folks behind Shire City Herbals, maker of popular health tonic Fire Cider, are smart, business savvy, open-minded, and funny as all get-out, which makes them a kick to work with. For this multilayered, website copywriting and branding project, we started with a branding session. I interviewed the three owners and their marketing manager and helped them articulate their focus and voice as a business, then distilled all of the information into a vision statement and mission statement that’s uniquely Fire Cider, but that also speaks clearly to their community-first, sustainability-oriented business approach. I also created a house style guide that they can add to as they go, so no matter who’s on staff, their communications are always consistent and cohesive.

The Fire Cider website itself is complex, with a homepage and two separate FAQs (one for wholesale and one for retail customers), as well as the usual subpages, such as About Us and Contact Us—all with multiple internal and external links…and a bunch of fun movie and pop-culture references. The site also features a shopping page. Because the back-end architecture doesn’t allow for canonical tags, I circumvented the duplicate-content issue by creating distinctive, SEO-rich product descriptions that rank well in search, without sacrificing readability or entertainment.