Why Most Winery Websites Stink, Part II

According to Overdone: why are restaurant websites so horifically bad?, here's the answer:

Restaurant sites are the product of restaurant culture. These nightmarish websites were spawned by restaurateurs who mistakenly believe they can control the online world the same way they lord over a restaurant.

Substitute winery for restaurant and you're there.  The wine business, in general, is about things being "just so," from the blending of juice to the look of the label.  There are a lot of recovering type-A people in the biz.

There are other factors at work, as this quote points out:

"Say you're a designer and you've got to demo a site you've spent two months creating," Bohan explains. "Your client is someone in their 50s who runs a restaurant but is not very in tune with technology. What's going to impress them more: Something with music and moving images, something that looks very fancy to someone who doesn't know about optimizing the Web for consumer use, or if you show them a bare-bones site that just lists all the information? I bet it would be the former—they would think it's great and money well spent."

which I think does a lot to explain why winery websites frequently fail to work well for visitors.  And, as the article also points out, many designers get paid by the hour, so it's in their financial interest to create works of art, which may or may not meet the needs of visitors.  (Hate mail from web designers in 3...2...1)

 I understand the need for wineries to outsource their Web presence to third parties.  It's just that the real measurement of a website -- its effectiveness in meeting the needs of visitors -- is (a) hard to measure, (b) not generally available for comparison, and (c) questioned by skeptical winery owners.  So, important decisions about website design frequently come down to "Is it pretty?" or "Do I (the winery owner) like it?"

PS - If you missed Part I, it's here.  Some possible fixes are here (including some great reader comments).

Comments

[Larry Chandler]

You've hit it right with this post. One of the most frustrating things in building sites is dealing with owners and winemakers. Their passion is making wine, not websites. Yet they don't understand websites and don't really care to.

And frequently even if they hire someone other than their wife's cousin in Alabama to build their site, they have no clue as to what works, what will help them sell wine, and what will gain them new customers. Sites have been designed and approved only to hear from the owner that this and that must be changed, and here are 10 new pages that have to be seen first before anyone can order. One owner actually told me "the customer has to do some of the work."

Passionate and excellent winemakers really feel their passion and knowledge applies to everything they touch. Well, wrong. It does not.

[Ian]

Great article. I think you're right on a number of points. I sell this wine in the Chicago market and they have done a great job with a simple, consumer focused site.
theshakedownwine.com

[prabodhan patil]

Nice guide for restaurant sites.

[rick]

I saw that article. It misses the point, really. The reason many restaurant and winery sites are not good is because no one is approaching them from the simple perspective of how the site helps the business.

The problem is simple - people are approaching the site as a design task, not a sales and marketing one. Web designers shouldn't be under the gun to do that thinking - they're designers (in general). A good designer can create a design that serves a purpose not if the purpose isn't defined.

Winery or restaurant owners aren't online marketers who think about content strategy, conversion paths and the like. Both parties are aesthetically inclined to boot. Put the two together and what do you have? People who are inclined to create lovely sites but not necessarily sites that are architected to generate business.

A business, any business, needs to start a website project by exploring what they want the site to do for their business, what they need to create in order to accomplish those goals and how they will make it easy for visitors to take the steps needed so that the business goals are achieved. Instead, people usually start with the visual design which should come MUCH later in the process.

[Paula]

Im such a newbie when it comes to all this, thanks for taking the time to write this up, keep them coming! was a wonderful read.