10 Things Every Winery Web Site Must Include

I wish I'd written it: 10 Things Every Winery Web Site Must Include.

None of these things are revolutionary, expensive, or otherwise difficult. Most wineries have this information readily available; it is just a matter of publishing it to their website.

Ah, there's the rub.  Partly because for many wineries, "publishing it to their website" is just too darn hard.

Your winery Web site *should* be the authoritative source of information about your wines (each one of them) on the Web.  Why isn't it?

Google your best-selling wine.  Why isn't your Web page for that wine the number one result?  Worth thinking about.

Comments

[rick]

This is why I'm a strong advocate of basing sites on Wordpress or some other easy to use light CMS software. At that point the argument about it being too hard goes straight out the window and people who aren't doing it need to confront the fact that they're not making it a priority to get done.

But in fact I don't think the too hard argument is the core of it. The core problem is that too many people still feel the web is a marginal channel not really worth their effort. Since they don't put any effort into it, it remains a marginal channel for them.

[Kris]

I agree with Rick. There is another issue, especially with small wineries, that they don't have a web/marketing staff and all updates have to go through a web designer, which can be a cumbersome process.

Since they don't have the resources or ability to do the updates themselves, they put up some generic text, sometimes leaving off the vintages so they don't have to even change the text once a year.

They feel that their time is better spent on other things, and sometimes that is true. However, sending one of your staff to a basic web design class at the local community college can go a long way...

[rick]

Kris,

it's not even web design. I build sites for people using Wordpress and they're invariably thrilled that they can update text, upload pictures and video, add new pages or subpages and in general manage all of the content on their site without knowing a thing about HTML.

Whenever I hear people say they don't have the time or resources to do this I roll my eyes and think "You don't have the time to tell potential customers about your products? You won't take the time to post descriptions and tasting notes for each wine as you bottle it? If you don't care about your product enough to do that... why should your customers care about it?"