Love him or hate him, wine critic/blogger Steve Heimoff hits this particular nail on the head:
The biggest mistake most wineries make online is to establish a website, put some stuff up, and then let it molder for months if not years. I routinely get tasting samples in the mail ...So I’ll go to the website for info, only to find that the vintage hasn’t been updated for two years!... when you deliberately go to a website expecting something new and useful, only to find a bunch of old, boring stuff, it’s an insult. You actually feel resentment to the company for being lazy and uncaring and unprofessional. Not good.
(from An example of how social marketing works for a winery -- maybe).
The top error for winery websites remains a lack of freshness, from home pages which haven't changed in years, to a lack of information about new vintages, to "News" pages where the last update was more than a year ago.
A related mistake is to throw out the "old, boring stuff" on your website wholesale, instead of archiving items which have long-term value to visitors. Disk space is cheap and search engines are your friends. Someone just might want to read about that 10-year-old vintage they pulled from the cellar for tonight's party. Ideally, your website has information about every vintage you've every produced.
Not if I can help it.
Posted by: Kevin Onesko | October 14, 2011 at 08:54 AM
Yep. Something I've said in comments here for a long time. There seem to be two main reasons...
First, some people seem to treat websites as magical things that will increase business at once and when that doesn't happen, they quit putting in effort.
Second, they've had someone build their site and it's static HTML so that they can't update it without getting hold of the developer, etc. A not-insignificant chunk of my business is redesigning websites that need an update because they've been neglected for so long AND moving them from static HTML to a CMS like Wordpress so that the business people can update the site.
I really need an organized way to find these folks since many of them want to update their site but it became a hassle, the developer moved on and they have no idea of how to update the code, etc. Once the site's really out of date, motivation flags, other things take their time, etc. Give them a site based on Wordpress or similar and they actually will update the site much of the time.
Posted by: rick | October 14, 2011 at 10:25 AM
The new template based sites offered by vin65.com should help improve things... no up front cost and full access to their CMS etc.
At least in my case, keeping it up to date is no problem, but posting older vintages hasn't happened mostly because I have had occasion to migrate my site twice to a new provider. Retrofitting old vintage content to a new site is usually the last priority...
Posted by: El Jefe | October 14, 2011 at 11:23 AM
Wineries commission a website and think that that is it job finished
Posted by: George Wroblewski | October 18, 2011 at 08:44 AM
Slightly off-topic, but related... I've been trying to change my email address with all those wineries (and other businesses) where I belong to their emailing list.
Those wineries using ConstantContact to send email have made this process the easiest. The ConstantContact interface is pretty clear.
VerticalResponse (which I use for the wineries I consult with) does not handle address changes well. You basically need to unsubscribe then take the time to find the location on the winery Web site where you can sign up for the mail list again. As you've pointed out previously, that can be time-consuming, or even impossible (robertmondavi.com for example).
I had been wondering why my unsubscribes in VerticalResponse had been increasing for current wine club members, and now I know why.
One more thing (among many you've pointed out over the years) that I need to work on.
Thanks again for this site, Mike!
Posted by: Jon Bjork | October 27, 2011 at 08:29 AM