Vin65 Blog

How often should you update your winery website?

Keeping your website fresh is key to its success. Visitors won’t return if the content is stale and dated.

So how often should you update your site? As often as possible! (Sorry for the smart ass answer.) In reality the answer varies from website to website and depends on your audience and your goals.

Let’s look at the different sections of your site.

Ecommerce:
Update your specials and offerings as often as you want customers to return to your site. For wine retailers you probably want customers returning every week or two weeks. For wineries it's probably more realistic for customers to return once a month.

You also want to ensure your product content is as accurate as possible. New products should be offered on the site at the same time they are offered in your tasting room or store. Product ratings, reviews, awards, and other details should be updated as soon as possible.

At a minimum, you should review your store once a month.

General Content:
Some content might not be important to update as often. For time sensitive information (such as events, allocation information, etc) a strategy should be in place to ensure this information is kept up to date (Most content management systems allow for content to be added or removed from a site on specific dates). If the most recent winery events that appear on your page are several months (or years) old, your web visitors will get a sense that you're not enthused or not paying attention to details.

You should probably review your general content at least once a month.

Blog:
If your goal is daily or weekly visitors then you need daily or weekly blog content. With blogging it’s important to have consistent updates if you want long term readership.

Design:
The design of your site needs to be updated a lot less frequently than the content. Your design should be updated if it's starting to look stale, if you’re missing features, if it's falling short when compared to your competitors; or anytime you update your brand, logo, or business cards.

Design changes should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Repeat visitors need to feel like your site is changing for the better and should be able to figure out any design changes.

For most wineries and wine stores, we suggest the design of your website should be rrefeshed every one and half to two years (again this often should be evolutionary and minor rather than full scale redesigns).

If you feel like you need to update your website... you're probably right.  What do you think? 

Jun 30, 2010 at 8:00 AM

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How to guide your customers to a purchase?

Your customer is on your winery website, has found the wine he wants, has placed his purchases in the shopping cart and is now ready to checkout.

Which of the following two shopping cart pages triggers the behavior you want your customer to take?

vs

All buttons are not equal. One of the 3 tenets of the Fogg Behavior Model is that you need to trigger the behavior you want customers to take.

Once an item is placed in a cart, you want the the path to checkout to be very clear. Yes you still need buttons to change the quantity, check their shipping, etc but the largest most contrasting button is the button most often clicked and this should be the checkout button as illustrated in design #2.

Dec 15, 2009 at 9:00 AM

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3 Mistakes When Redesigning Your Website

Thinking about redesigning your winery website? If so, here are three common mistakes to avoid before jumping into your redesign.

1. Forgetting about Search Engines and Inbound Links

Even though your old site might be dated, it still garners traffic from outside sources. Half the people visiting a winery website enter via a search engine. Inbound links from blogs, social media, and other websites also represent a good portion of traffic.

These links to product pages, company pages, contact pages, etc are often broken in a site redesign. (Different platforms and designers handle URLs differently, and often you will want your URL structure updated for search engine ranking and other reasons).

The proper way to handle updating URL structure is:

• Look at your site analytics and determine where your traffic is coming from and what links people are visiting.
• Create 301 redirects pointing traffic from your old links to your new links. (A 301 redirect is the proper way to inform search engines that the redirected URL is the new URL for the old content). Your developer should be able to do this for you (or in the case of our platform you can do it inside our content management system)

2. Forgetting about your Frequent Customers

Your most frequent site visitors probably don't want you to drastically change the site design (even if it's better, people don't always want to learn a new way of doing a task).

In an ideal world, your site would be continually enhanced rather than drastically altered every few years. If your club members are used to coming to your site and quickly placing an order, and you then completely redesign the store, it often throws the user way off.

Consider the redesign we did this past year for Twisted Oak. The new site is more of a progression on the old site rather than an evolution. The overall navigation structure and location of the wines and products didn't change that much and previous visitors should be able to find their way around.

Bottom line, think 'evolution' rather than 'revolution'.

3. Not Setting any Goals Before Jumping In

We see a lot of redesigns just because a site is dated. While it's fine to redesign a dated site, it's even better to set goals for your site.

Design is very important to your site, but you should look first at function, structure, goals, and business objectives of the site. Your designer should walk you through a design process that starts with these goals.

We start all of our sites with a goal questionnaire followed by wireframes. A wireframe will allow you to focus on function (for example what are the key elements on the homepage and what are their goals) rather than on design.

Bonus:

One more thing to think about when redesigning your site is the historical data. If you are switching platforms, it's important that order history, customer lists and other data be brought over to your new site. The longer you sell online, the more important this data becomes. (Being able to build lists, segment customers, etc off historical data is a very effective way of marketing.)

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If you are thinking about a redesign, there are more options and better tools than ever before. Just make sure you are thinking about the overall affects rather than doing a redesign just for the sake of a redesign.
 

Nov 3, 2009 at 10:00 AM

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The Experience

As an owner of a wine web site one of the biggest challenges you will face is conveying "The Experience" of your winery, facility, vineyard, and wines. At Vin 65 we often get asked to capture as much of the atmosphere of the winery in the design of the web site as possible. We use all kinds of things like flash and photos to give the visitor to the web site as much as we can.

At Vin 65 we have lots of fun ideas, some are really out there. My current personal favourite is offering an online tasting pack. The purpose is give a visitor the option to have a virtual tasting room experience. In a tasting room there is a $10 fee or something to taste some wine and then you get a credit towards your purchase. So why not built a tasting pack around 6 small bottles that are like 200ml or 150ml each and send it out for $25.00 or something with a $20.00 coupon towards their next purchase?

In this way you can give someone the option to try and savour some of your amazing wine if they can't get out to your winery for a tasting. It allows potential direct to trade customers to sample without spending hundreds of dollars. Getting out to the winery is the best, but if someone back East can't make it out this year for your new vintages, give them an option. How are you going to capture new customers or give your current fans a vehicle to send their friends a cool tasting gift.

Anyway, back to the main point of the post and that is sharing what your are all about on the web site, as limiting as a web site is. One thing you never see is a 360 view of your wine bottle. Now, hardly anyone does this, maybe because the impact just wouldn't be worth effort. I saw it for the first time the other day and was shocked how much more impact it had than I thought was possible. It looks really impressed on silk screened labels, but works on any bottle. Take a look at JAQK Cellars - and click the 360 view on the drilldown page. I like it - a lot, I feel like I am experiencing that bottle of wine as much as I can with out opening it.

Sep 8, 2009 at 9:00 AM

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New Admin Interface

A little bit of a self promotion. This morning we launched our new interface on our admin panel. (137 websites are awaking to the new interface today, the other 160ish sites are seeing the new UI in the next couple of weeks).

We have some clear goals around our admin panel. It has to be as simple as possible. We want the user interface to be intuitive and friendly (both for a positive experience for our users and because it cuts our customer support costs).

We have some lesser known goals. The interface has to work with some of the technology in place. The CSS has to be light and fit well into existing code. The overall interface has to be 'white brandable' for some of our partners.

Here are some of the decisions we made with a new user interface:

1. Our users vary in the technology they use. Unfortunately 7.3% of our users are still using IE 6 and we felt we had to still support that 8 year old browser. 15% of our users are on Macs.  Firefox and Safari both represents sizable percentages of users (so no browser specific code). Screen resolution also varies drastically, with 27% of our users still using the 1024x768 resolution.
2. Our users involvement vary. 40-50% of users login on a daily basis. Other users don't log in for months. We wanted to make sure when users first login, they would not feel overwhelmed by the new interface.
3. Our users vary in their technical capabilities. While we don't rank our users technical savviness, we know that some of our users are very web savvy, while other users are not as savvy. We needed to make sure the non-savvy people would feel okay with the changes.

If your a current admin panel users - we would love your feedback. Either email me directly at andrew@vin65.com, or leave a comment below.

Aug 19, 2009 at 8:00 AM

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Improving Customer Experience Part 2: The Checkout

The customer experience in the checkout process will make a difference in whether a customer completes the transaction or abandons their cart. 

Here are five points to consider in your checkout process:  

1) Make it easy for customers to get to the checkout area. Once items have been added to the cart, the "checkout" button should be clearly marked and visible to the customer. This button should be the largest button on the cart page. (Also ensure that when a customer clicks the checkout button, they are taken to the checkout page.)

2) Keep the customer focused. Once inside the checkout area, don't lead the customer away to other sales or promotions. The checkout process should be fully enclosed and devoid of almost all navigational elements. (Have you noticed that most large ecommerce stores switch their navigation or remove their navigation in the checkout area.)

3) Only capture the information required. This seems obvious, but how many times in the checkout process have you been asked for buying preferences, newsletter signups, or even to select a username and password. Gathering extraneous information can easily be done after the customer checks out. (Use contact points such as the confirmation page and order confirmation emails to request the user signup for your newsletter, create an account, etc)

4) Assure the customer about the trustworthiness and security of the checkout process. Trustworthiness can be communicated through a security assurance message and having an SSL certificate. Trustworthiness is also communicated by posting contact information, delivery charges and by having a smooth checkout process.

5) Use Customer Friendly Forms. There are a large number eye tracking studies with regards to forms and labels. It's accepted that the form fields should fit the information that is to be entered and should be clearly labelled. Studies also show clear advantages when the label is placed directly above the form field.  Form fields are not a great place to show off creativity.

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Is customer experience costing you sales? Visit the recent store we launched for Cuvaison and tell us what you think of the customer experience. We would love to hear your opinion.

Jul 5, 2009 at 11:00 AM

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One key factor for a better user experience.

What is the top factor in creating a better user experience?

I was reading through the 'Usability Study: Men Need Speed' talking about gender differences in web.  While the study's sampling size is small, 'Ease of Use' trumps Download Speed, Navigation, Accessibility, and Customization for both men and women.

I found this interesting as it conflicts with what I feel is an almost natural tendency for website owners to request more and more features. (Can we add multiple ship-tos, multiple payment methods, and a few more options inside the checkout process - or perhaps we should just make it really simple and easy to use)

May 3, 2009 at 9:00 PM

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Who takes care of the content?

Mike Duffy from The Winery Website Report wrote a nice little blog post this past week titled 'Thinking of Redesigning Your Winery Website?' where he links to a good article on 'Who takes care of the content'.

If you're planning a website the content plays a key role. So does photography (if you don't have a great photo next to your content, most people will just skip over the text). Website design, typography, 'call to action' phrases, button color, etc all play key roles.

At Vin|65 we have a set process we take our clients through:

1. Discovery Process: we determine the goals of your website, setup bench marks to measure against, etc.
2. Functional Requirements: we look at your current site, what your competitors are doing, determine the feature list, etc.
3. Wireframes and Site Map: here we spend time deciding where the key elements need to appear, how much priority they should have, content needed, etc.
4. Design Concepts: this is the fun part (and where to many web designers start)
5. Etc…

People's personalities differ - some of our clients are really creative and love design, some of our clients are competitive and are really focused on the 'call to action' phrases. We do have some methodical clients that spend an incredible amount of time on content (we really have a client like this right now).

People can fall into a trap and choose a specific area on their site where they really want to focus, such as the creative, or the widgets, or at neat little Web 2.0 button, etc and because their personality type isn't attracted to other elements such as the content, they skip over those elements. (I'm guilty of this – I'm a competitive person, and I typically just skim text – I have to remember there are methodical people that really read all the text, and there are humanistic type of people that really like people pictures and testimonials, etc)

It's our job as web designers and developers to help balance our client and come up with great design, great content, and ultimately a great website.

Thoughts?

Feb 21, 2009 at 9:48 PM

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How's your site search working?

How's your site search working? Are customers frustrated by the results? Do you even track the searches people make and the number of results you return.

This hilarious little video showed up on Future Now's blog last week and explains the problem with most website searches.

Dec 21, 2008 at 10:00 PM

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New Website Launch: Burgundy & Beyond

We've just launched a new winery website, Burgundy & Beyond powered on Vin | 65’s platform. We’ve worked hard on this site and are excited for it to finally be live. Check out the site and send us feedback on the design, navigation, functionality, and e-commerce experience.

Burgundy and Beyond is a wine boutique specialized in domain-direct French wines from Burgundy, Champagne, Bordeaux, the Loire and the Rhône. They offer an extensive selection from the Louis Latour portfoilio, including the wines of Maison Louis Latour, Simonnet Febvre and Henry Fessy, as well as a handful of other rare jewels that complement our Burgundy-rich palette.

Below is a screenshot of the old version of Burgundy & Beyond.

Aug 27, 2008 at 5:30 PM

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