Is Your Winery Web Site Memorable?

Here's a post-worth-reading from 37signals about making memorable (Web site) designs.

To sum it up briefly, your site may look good, but what does it say?

The comments make for interesting reading.  You can see the pragmatists vs. the designers at war.

It's similar to the recent brouhaha when Google's chief visual designer resigned in a huff because all the design choices at Google are driven by data: what actually happens when a user looks at it?

It's all about selling more of your wine, right?  I'd rather have an ugly Web site that generated lots of wine sales, than a beautiful site that no one ordered from.

What do you think?  (he said, putting on his asbestos pants...)

Comments

[Josh]

Why not both? A good looking site that does its main job: helps you sell wine.

The lead designer didn't leave Google because he didn't like the data driven nature of their process, he left because he didn't think they applied it correctly. He wanted his intuition an experience to have some weight as well. When you test for things as granular as the width of a border, or the opacity and spread of a drop shadow, you need two things to be true:

1. A lot of traffic
2. A lot of time to do the tests.

Google had both, and good for them.

Typically winery websites have neither. So, better to put your best practices together with a solid design by a trusted designer and, if you have the time and the traffic, test a couple major elements via A/B slit testing and evolve it from there.

But you know what, only Constellation owned brands (and then only a fraction of those) will ever go through the trouble. I know of a very large privately owned winery that didn't bother to track the results from its recent online promotion. You think anyone is bothering to A/B split their sign up link? :-p

Love your recent run of posts Mike!

[Kris]

I agree with Josh, why not have both?

I think it depends on your market as well. If you're looking to sell to high end clients, you probably would want to make a website that is aesthetically pleasing. Creating a website that is visually pleasing may also add security to your user that your website is legitimate.