The Winery Web Site Report

Winery Web Sites and Macromedia Flash

Macromedia's Flash enables Web sites to do enhanced presentation of audio, images, and video (so-called "rich media"), along with interactivity.  Most systems come pre-installed with the free Flash player (Macromedia cites a statistic which indicates over 97% of users can view Flash presentations).  Lots of Web designers are eager to take advantage of Flash to create visually-arresting "cool" sites for their clients?

Should you be using Flash on your winery Web site?

Let's look at some examples:

WINERIES WHICH DON'T USE FLASH ON THEIR HOME PAGE:

1. http://www.acornwinery.com/
2. http://www.connvalleyvineyards.com/
3. http://www.buckzin.com/
4. http://www.mirassou.com/
5. http://www.lynmarwinery.com/ (used to, though)

WINERIES WHICH DO USE FLASH ON THEIR HOME PAGE:

6. http://www.inmanfamilywines.com/
7. http://www.ironhorsevineyards.com/
8. http://www.zdwines.com/
9. http://www.quintessa.com/
10. http://www.kingestate.com/

Which of these 10 sites are most/least visitor-effective?  Does Flash play any part in it?  Please offer a comment, especially if you're from one of the wineries above.  I'll be posting my analysis in a couple of days.

(Update:  read my analysis of Sites That Don't Flash and Sites Which Flash)

(If there are some particular good or bad examples of Flash/non-Flash winery sites, post them with your comments as well!  With over 2,200+ winery Web sites, I'm sure I've missed some worth mentioning here.)

WHOIS Alexa?

(caution: mild geekiness ahead - it's for a good cause, though...)

There's an interesting site called www.whois.sc, which finds out interesting information about domain names (like YourWineryName.com). You might find it interesting to look up what they know about your domain name.  Just append your domain name to http://www.whois.sc/.  For example, here's the whois.sc listing for KingEstate.com: http://www.whois.sc/kingestate.com

One of the features of whois.sc is that you can see what Alexa.com considers to be sites that are related to yours (you can get the same info directly from Alexa - here's "People who visit this page also visit" for KingEstate.com).  Alexa gets its data from people who allow it to track their Web surfing, so it's far from perfect (and non-existent for lightly trafficked sites, like most small wineries).  Alexa also provides traffic estimates/rankings and lists sites that link to yours.

Both Whois.sc and Alexa provide interesting information about your domain and Web site, so they're worth having in your bag of tricks.  Plus, they're free!

(WHOIS is the name of the internet protocol which allows you to ask questions about the ownership  of a domain name.  Every company that registers domain names (a "registrar") maintains their own WHOIS database.  Some domain registrars allow you to hide your WHOIS information (usually for an additional fee), although this seems a little silly for a business entity.)

The Winemaker's Diary

Everett Bandman of UC Davis points out that we're missing The Winemaker's Diary (from David Coffaro Estate Vineyard) on our list of winery blogs.

Yes and no.  It certainly qualifies as a diary, going back to 1999 1998.  Talk about dedication!  But it lacks an RSS feed, which means people can't subscribe to it to receive automatic notification of new/updated material.  I wonder if Dave Coffaro, clearly a blogger in spirit, would consider using a more modern tool like TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger?

Regardless, I've added The Winemaker's Diary to our list, with the "no RSS feed" caveat.  Joe Bob says, "Check it out."

(Coffaro sells most of their wine as "crazy futures", which is an interesting approach to problem of making money from wine.)

New Winery, No Web Site?

So, according to this press release from Tuesday (Valentine's Day), Brian Carter, a well-known winemaker, has started a new winery:  Brian Carter Cellars, located in Washington state.  Congratulations!

But... No mention of his new winery's Web site in the press release.  I made a reasonable guess (which is why The Winery Web Site Report recommends you have a "reasonable" domain name, possibly several of them), and looked up the WHOIS information on BrianCarterCellars.com.  Sure enough, he owns it. 

But... www.BrianCarterCellars.com presently returns a 403 error status - in other words, whatever's there, I'm not allowed to look at it (yet?  ever? who knows?). 

UPDATE: as of 04/01/2006, the Brian Carter Cellars site is operational.  Nevertheless, my comments about missed opportunity still apply.

This is silly. In a business that is driven by lists of people interested in your wine, Mr. Carter is missing a great opportunity to put up an absolutely bare-bones Web page which simply says "Want to know more?" and has a space for visitors to submit their e-mail address (followed by the text of, or a link to, the press release).  Nothing fancy.  Heck, he's already got label art to spruce it up a bit.

Although I'm generally opposed to the "kid who lives next door" school of Web design, this is one of those instances where it would be better than a 403 error code.  And the people he is missing are exactly those he wants to capture: people who are interested in the next great wine.  After all, he went to the trouble of generating a press release about his new winery (and even spent some $$ to get special treatment for it on PRWEB.com).

Realistically, this isn't a fatal error, and I'm sure Brian Carter Cellars will thrive.  But some of the effort that went into getting the word out was wasted.

Regardless, we've added Brian Carter Cellars of Bellevue, WA and its URL to our database of wineries (2,886 and counting).  And if you're thinking of launching a winery, give me a call to talk about your Web site (1-888-WINERY-WEB).  We don't build them, but we do know a lot about them (and it's the best way to make sure we know about you).

(Thanks to Wine Industry Report for the original link.  They have an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe.)

(BTW, the 403 error code means "Forbidden."  Sound ominous?  Actually, it just means the Web server is specifically disallowed from serving pages for that URL.)

Make It Easy on Yourself

Yesterday I was reviewing a Winery Web Site Report for a 20,000 case "cult" winery in the enviable position of selling everything they make to their mailing list.  Their Web site is a little Spartan (after all, they already have all the friends they need), and I'm pretty sure they have lots of interesting material which doesn't appear on their site (e.g. copy from their periodic mailings).  You probably have some of that, too.

The question is "Why doesn't everything written about your wine make it to your Web site?"  Part of the answer (even for cult wineries) is that it's probably a fair-sized pain to retrieve that content from wherever it lives.

So let me offer this tip:  if you're thinking about investing in your Web site, think about spending money on making it easy to take words and images you develop for other purposes and publish them on your site. Make it easy on yourself.  After all, it cost money to write those words and create those images, so it's smart to use them as widely as possible.

Convenient publishing is one reason for the rise of PDF files - with the help of Adobe Acrobat, most programs will output to PDF, which is pretty simple to post on a Web site.  It's also a reason for the popularity of blogs - if you write something in a blog, you can refer people to it easily.

(Aside: Do wineries that are selling all their wine need a Web site?  Screaming Eagle no longer does - only Google's cache shows that they had one back in 2004.  What do you think?   Add a comment.)

Current Style in Web Design

One designer's opinion on the current state of the universe.  Take a look and see what you think.

I've been writing a post in my head about how to approach site design for wineries, which is an outgrowth of conversations I had at the Advanced Tasting Room Strategies conference, mostly (it seemed) with people who hated their existing sites and were about to undertake a redesign.  Stay tuned, it's almost ready to be written down.

Of course, a new design can have the same old problems in prettier clothing.  You really want to start by thinking like a visitor.

(Thanks to my office-neighbor, Web designer Jason Reed for the original link)

Test Driving Your Wine

Guy Kawasaki's recent blog post about sales makes the following recommendation (which is relevant to wineries and their Web sites):

Enable Test Drives
...Therefore, do whatever it takes to enable people to download a trial version of your software, use your web site, drive your car, eat at your restaurant, or attend your church service.

Or taste your wine.

For wineries, tasting rooms are the physical embodiment of this recommendation, as is pouring your wine at events.  Reviews and ratings of your wine by third parties are stand-ins for actual tasting by a potential customer.  Think about your wine from the perspective of someone who drinks wine, but is unfamiliar with yours.  What questions are in their minds?  Most likely: "What does this wine taste like?"  and "Will I like it?", or perhaps "Is this wine any good?" If you look at a wine review, those are the questions the reviewer is trying to address.

An important goal , perhaps the goal, of all your marketing activities is to get someone to taste your wine.  If you agree, then take a look at your winery Web site and see how well it encourages and assists someone to do just that.  In particular, take a look at those often-anemic-and-sterile words on the pages for individual wines. 

Maybe you should be telling your visitors "How to test drive our wine..." with links to (a) special "test drive" offers (375ml bottles anyone?), (b) restaurants and retailers that serve your wine, (c) how to visit the winery, and (d) upcoming events where you'll be pouring.

(Help me out here, winery readers: what sort of a "test drive" should The Winery Web Site Report offer to encourage wineries to purchase a full Report?)

(Note: Guy Kawasaki is a semi-famous "product evangelist," having gotten his start evangelizing the Macintosh computer to software developers while at Apple Computer in the 1980s.  Now he's rich, and does the venture-capital thing.)

Newsletter: February, 2006

Last Tuesday we sent out the Feburary, 2006 issue of our e-mail newsletter, Effective Winery Web Sites, with brief articles on the 3 signs that your Web site is working, a bit about winery blogging, and 5 must-do Web-based marketing tasks.

If you'd like to receive Effective Winery Web Sites via e-mail, you can subscribe on our home page.

Last Tuesday we sent out the Feburary, 2006 issue of our e-mail newsletter, Effective Winery Web Sites, with brief articles on the 3 signs that your Web site is working, a bit about winery blogging, and 5 must-do Web-based marketing tasks.

If you'd like to receive Effective Winery Web Sites via e-mail, you can subscribe on our home page.

Classical Music in the Tasting Room?

Or maybe an oompah band:

Similar experiments have shown that classical music can make people buy more expensive wine, or spend more in restaurants.

You're not as impervious to suggestion as you might think, even though most people don't like be knowingly manipulated.

Finger Lakes (NY) Winery Web Sites

Some time back,  Finger Lakes Weekend Wino (FLWW) asked  if we would extract the top-ranked Finger Lakes winery Web sites from our data.  Although it took a little bit of time (most because I'm a stickler for checking the accuracy of our published data), it finally got done, and  FLWW has now blogged our Finger Lakes Winery Website Rankings.  The post makes this excellent point:

It may be true that not as many people will actually buy product from a website, but it is also a fact that people do a large amount of their pre-buying research from browsing websites. So please, for the sake of your customers and potential customers, get those websites updated and make them a real reflection of your passion for making great wine and your pride in your products.

It's nice to hear that people who enjoy wine actually care about the visitor effectiveness of winery Web sites.  It's not just something I made up to sell custom reports to wineries.  It's all about creating and sustaining relationships with people who are interested in (the story of) your wine (buyers, browsers, the trade, media).

PS - if you're a winery in the Finger Lakes region, you should definitely subscribe to Finger Lakes Weekend Wino (as well as Lenndevours, which frequently talks about Finger Lakes wines).  As always, I recommend the browser-based Bloglines as a painless introduction to blog subscriptions.

Winery Podcasting

I was looking at the Don Sebastiani and Sons Web site (Wine Enthusiast's American Winery of the Year!) the other day and noticed that they have a whole array of short podcasts (which appear to be spoken-word descriptions of the associated wines).  As it turns out, Tim Elliott at WineCast had already noted the existence of the Sebastiani podcasts in a recent post, as well as Napa Valley Wine Radio, a regular podcast from Goosecross Cellars.

No less than The Wall St. Journal has now picked up podcasting as a business tool (in a well-written StartupJournal.com article - no subscription required), so I thought I ought to at least mention podcasting here.  Of course, if you're reading a blog, you probably have at least heard about podcasts, particularly since Apple now supports it with iTunes.

Podcasts are pretty simple to understand - they're really just digital audio files (e.g. MP3s).  As with blogs, the secret sauce is that you can subscribe to a podcast (using the same RSS technology that underlies blogs), which means the audio file is automatically downloaded to your computer and/or MP3 player, such as an iPod (hence the name) without additional effort on your part.  An iPod is not required to listen to a podcast.

All this is just by way of encouraging you to go listen to a podcast or two.  Like blogs, podcasts are just another potential means of building relationships with people who are interested in the story behind your wine.  A good storytelling tool, whether written  (blog) or spoken (podcast) is worth knowing about.

New Winery Blog: Judd's Hill (and some blogging tips)

I've just added Judd's Harvest Blog (from Judd's Hill in the Napa Valley) to our list of winery blogs.  The problem with a harvest blog, of course, is that it doesn't sound very fresh for 2/3rds of the year.  And, as you might expect, Judd's blog hasn't been updated since October, even though I'm quite sure that there are interesting things going on at Judd's Hill right now.

I'm not trying to be critical here - blogging isn't easy (well, at least not for most people - I'm in awe of the way Tom Wark turns out a stream of polished postings over at FERMENTATION).  Even though I average a post every 2-3 days, there are some times when I go a week or more without posting (like last week, with a speaking engagement coming up, or even now, as we start a direct mail effort).

Some general hints to keep the blog posts flowing:

1. Keep a list of things you'd like to blog about (so when the mood [or scheduled time] strikes, you're ready to go).
2. Approach each post with the attitude, "I'm just going to write a paragraph.." (so that it doesn't become a daunting task).  It's funny how you almost always end up writing more.
3. If you can, set a regular time to blog (30 minutes once a week, preferably with a glass of wine, is a good habit).
4. If you are comfortable with digital picture-taking, an interesting picture with a good descriptive paragraph makes a great post (again, make it easy on yourself).
5. If your blogging system is painful to use, consider a change.  It's really got to be dead-easy.  After all, there are wines to be made!

Remember, the goal of winery blogging isn't exhaustive information (it's not a term paper).  It's a little "here's something interesting" to build interest in your wines and winery.  A regular series of honest and interesting posts, however brief, is generally better than going quiet for long periods.  And the secret to that is to make it as easy as possible for yourself.

It's February 7th, and you know what that means...

Valentine's Day is a week away.  As I've said elsewhere, one of the biggest problems for winery Web sites is keeping them fresh (and conveying that freshness to visitors).  Right about now, I would expect nearly every winery Web site to have something on their home page or blog talking about Valentine's Day.  Sadly, that's not the case.  As always, take a tip from Wine.com - they definitely know that St. Valentine is the patron of wine as well as love, and their home page reflects that.

One of the points I emphasized to people I spoke to on the show floor at the Advanced Tasting Room Strategies conference last week is that your site (particularly your home page) needs to be designed for easy updates - if it's onerous or expensive, ain't gonna happen.

If you need some Valentine's Day inspiration, take a look at Mary Baker's post on Queen's Choice over at the Dover Canyon blog, or this selection of quotes from Tom Wark at FERMENTATION.  Then start planning your monthly home page update for the rest of 2006.

(And if you see some good examples of V-Day site updates, please post a link in the comments)

Home Page Goals

Since I spent yesterday morning talking to a great audience at the Advanced Tasting Room Strategies conference about The Perfect Winery Web Site, and the afternoon talking to attendees at our show booth about the challenges they face with their Web sites, this excellent new article entitled Home Page Goals seems especially relevant.  The author, Derek Powazek, identifies these four goals for a home page:

1. Answer the question, "What is this place?"
2. Dont' get in the repeat visitor's way
3. Show what's new
4. Provide consistent, reliable global navigation

and goes further to say that the "core page" (the page which describes an individual wine on a winery Web site) and the home page are the two most important site design issues.

...home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals.

Yesterday was a valuable day - talking with potential customers about their Web sites always yields new ways of looking at things.  Lots of people I spoke with are looking a re-design of their site, and are trying to avoid spending money which results in a new look but the same problems.  This article is not a bad place to start the process.