When People Call About Your Winery Website...

If the person who answers your phone isn't completely familiar with your winery website, they should be.

Otherwise, how are they going to help someone who needs help with the website?

For example, today I called a business because the event schedule on their website was out of date.  When I mentioned that fact to them, they said "Gosh, it is?  I'll let someone know."  I'm not real confident of a fix, because the person I mentioned it to on the phone clearly has no way to see if the problem gets fixed (assuming that they are interested in such things to begin with).

I don't expect anyone in a small winery to be sitting at a desk waiting for the phone to ring, but when it does, they should have a computer with access to the Web sitting in front of them.

As a manager or owner, you should be visiting your Web site on a weekly or monthly basis, at the very least, to make sure you're happy with what your visitors are experiencing.  It's easy -- just add a repeating event to your calendar.

Comments

[Kim Kolb]

Mike, as a Web Design and Marketing company, owners should be looking at there site once a day. I suggest first thing in the morning when they are checking their email.

Not only will they see if there site is up (could be a server outage) but they will see it every day and become familiar with it and it will also prompt them to maybe look over some existing content to ensure that everything is up to date. This also encourages blogging and doing all the social media posting that is going to benefit there business.

Too many times people get a website and think.."We are set" nothing could be further from the truth!

Good post.. Hopefully the company you are talking about follows your blog and they go check their site.

[Mike Duffy]

Kim - I stopped just short of telling people that their website should be their default "home page" in their browser, which is what I would like to see people do (but some people would rather see the news or their Facebook page or ...). That's the best way to make sure your site is up and running, as you pointed out.

Of course, the reason they don't make it their home page is that *it never changes* -- which is one of the main problems with winery websites to begin with.

A good question for any winery website is "Why would anyone come back for a second visit?"

[Larry Chandler]

It's not just important to see that your website is up when you log on first thing in the morning, but you need to know if there were any outages overnight. While all websites can experience outages, it's important to know if this is recurring randomly or if there is always a set time when the website is down.

A service like uptimerobot or any of several others can notify you when there is an outage and how long this outage was. It may be something you need to address with your host.

And of course, keeping your site fresh and interesting is what will bring people back to the site. If your events are days, weeks or months old, the customer may wonder if the wine he or she seeks is actually still available. Not taking care of your website may lead the customer to think you are not interested in his business.

[El Jefe]

Mike - The person answering the phone is most likely to not be the person who will actually fix the event schedule. However, their correct answer should be "I will let El Jefe know!" Deferring to the responsible party is appropriate in a lot of cases.

(Even better is to use a web host that has an event function that automagically delists events after they happen.)

[Andrew Kamphuis]

I agree with Jeff - use an event function that delists events after they happen. A good content management system is capable of this and nothing makes your website look more stale than dated content.