What We Offer
The following are some basic packages we offer to help streamline the site creation process. Keep in mind while browsing, however, that we are happy to accomodate anything you want in your website, even if it is not explicitly mentioned in one of our package deals. We understand that every winery has specific needs, and we endeavor to bring our clients' visions to life, no matter what those visions might be.
Complete Web Presence
This is our core package, which may be used as a stand-alone for wineries who don’t need additional services, or in conjunction with the add-ons that follow. The complete web presence includes a visual mockup, a fully-functional website, a content-management system (CMS) to update events or winemaker notes, detailed usage statistics, installation on a server, and submission to search engines.
We take any materials you may already have, such as your logo, labels, signs, and brochures, and create a design mockup reflecting the overall brand. We then make small changes to this mockup as you desire, before proceeding to create the full site. We work with you to make sure we have a design you're happy with before proceeding.
The site itself will vary in size and scope, depending on what information you wish to convey to your visitors. Many winery websites included pages for: Upcoming events, information about each wine, lists of awards, tasting information and directions to the winery, how to plan a visit, history of the winery, notes from the winemaker or cellar master, contact forms for reaching the winery via email, pairing suggestions for wines, and any number of other items.
For wineries that wish to include a section outlining upcoming events at the winery — open tastings, art shows, new vintage releases — and want the ability to easily update it themselves, we offer a basic CMS to do so. This includes a secure page a winery employee can log into with an easy-to-use form for adding events to the news page, and a dynamically updated news page that reflects these changes.
Finally, we setup a web server for the site and install everything, making sure things are fully operational before going live. Then we submit the site to the major search engines, so it can be easily found by users doing web searches. If further online advertising is desired, we offer an additional Advertising Package.
Basic e-Commerce
Direct-to-consumer wine sales via the internet are becoming an enormous source of revenue — particularly for small wineries where every bottle sold counts. Profit margins are dramatically increased, long-term relationships may be formed with customers, and it becomes much easier to transform a satisfied customer into a “brand ambassador” to spread the word of your wine far and wide.
Our Basic e-Commerce package gives your website a fully-functional shopping cart. The front-end that the customers interact with allows them to browse your inventory by category, search for keywords, make accounts so they can easily return, and make purchases through a secure, seamless system. The back-end of the store allows you to view all transactions, view customer profiles and their purchasing habits, add or edit categories and products, create temporary sale prices on products or entire groups, and export sales information for later browsing.
For many wineries the Basic e-Commerce package will do everything they need; however, for those who require special additions to their store, we offer an Advanced e-Commerce package as well.
Advanced e-Commerce
For wineries that need functionalities that go above and beyond our Basic e-Commerce package, we offer a more advanced service. The pricing for an Advanced e-Commerce setup varies depending on the number and complexity of features needed.
Some examples of things that would need the Advanced package are:
- Coupon and Gift Certificate Functions
- Advanced Customer Tracking
- Sub-Stores for Special Brands or Product Lines
- Extremely Large Stores
Advertising Package
As part of our Complete Web Presence package we include submission of your site to the major search engines and relevant web directories, but some wineries may want more in the way of online advertising. This package is the next step in promoting your winery website on the internet.
A large component of the “link popularity” of your site — a major factor in where it appears on search engines — is the amount of external sites which link to it. We track down each site that mentions your wines without links and inform them that your winery now has (or has expanded) a web presence, and would appreciate a direct link.
We also go through the thousands of wine-related sites on the internet, identifying those which we believe would have an affinity to your wine and writing them requesting a link. Those wine blogs or review sites we feel are an ideal fit — and will offer a substantial amount of traffic — we note as possible venues you may wish to send review bottles to.
We also do a workup of the various paid advertising options available, ranging from pay-per-click systems such as Google AdWords to site specific advertising on wine sites, giving you a detailed report analyzing the potential traffic and projected sales from each source.
Every winery has different needs when it comes to online advertising, and we pride ourselves on building a functional promotional plan ideally suited to your wines and winery.
Newsletter System
Many wineries may wish to have an optional newsletter system attached to their sites, so that visitors interested in keeping up to date on new releases and winery events can sign up for regular email correspondence.
The newsletter system includes an area on your site where the customer can enter their email address and other information to be added to a database, as well as a special system you will be able to log into to see a list of people who have signed up, and where you can easily create a newsletter and send it to the entire list or to a list based on specific criteria (such as people who have signed up only for information regarding a specific varietal).