The original premise of The Winery Web Site Report is this:
If they love you, they are more likely to make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter or read your blog or recommend you to a friend (i.e. do the things that you are hoping they will do -- i.e. "conversion").
From InsideCRM, here are 50 Ways Your Web Site Is Discouraging Conversions -- and How to Fix It.
Here are my 5 6 favorites:
- You're not listening to your visitors (this is basically our premise above).
- Your home page is all over the place.
- Your copy is written for you, not your customer.
- You're not offering a call to action.
- Your visitor has no idea where to go.
- It's too complicated.
Each of the 50 comes linked to an article with more details on how to fix the problem.
50 items is an almost certain recipe for overloading your already-too-busy brain, so what's a busy winery owner to do? Here's my suggestion: First, read over the list. Next, pick 3 or 4 items that sound like your Web site, and read the linked-to details. Then get together with your webmaster to see about getting them fixed.
Of course, you need to have some way of measuring results, so decide on that first and make sure you can measure it (and have a baseline metric).
What is your winery's #1 one conversion metric? Put another way, if your Web site worked "better," how could you tell? Leave a comment.
I'm a bit over half way through mining information from about 600 California winery Web sites for WineQuesters.com. Most sites are awful for quickly finding information, or even finding important information at all.
One big improvement would be if all the wineries had a Visit Us section in a prominent place with ALL the information a visitor would like to know. Almost every site scatters this information around the site and many leave out critical information entirely.
I'm very tired of searching winery Web sites but I have almost 300 to go. Yuck!
- jim
Posted by: Jim Preston | September 03, 2008 at 08:12 AM