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.)
Comments