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Wine Web Design

This category of posts covers how wine retail websites are designed and goes through some well known US wine retailer sites.

I suggest you start with Wine Website Design Basics, then check out an example such as wine.com’s design. If you want to get a little more technical How your Wine eCommerce website works Made Simple is a good overview.

Wine Web Wesign – the Traditional Development Model

22 December 2009

I’ve hired web designers all my business life. Until I started working with small businesses with small budgets. Then the bills that a corporate would sign off without hesitation looked like an extraordinary usage of a limited sales and marketing budget. So I started to work out how to make it cheaper. I had to with a small business. The web (including Google and email) gave the best ROI on marketing spend compared newspapers etc. Then in 2008 a new Open Source Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla 1.5 came onto the scene. Instead of doing lots of work on the ‘framework’ of a website I could install this software on a third party web server – and focus on the content and store.

Wine Web Design Basics

3 January 2010

Although the graphic design of wine websites can be as artistic or as functional as you so desire the overall structure really comes down to a few simple components: the header, the body, and the footer.

Wine.com web design

4 January 2010

Uses a left column structure across the site. An expanding menu over all the ways people search for wine, wine.com use to have a more simpler design so I’m guessing they’ve tested this and found that it converts better. Excellent website from one of the big guys.

K&L Wines website design

5 January 2010

Left column design, clean, with an easy filterable navigation. Real time inventory is a biggie, a lot of hard work has gone into this one.

BevMo wine web design

6 January 2010

A design with a left column home page and a 3 column products page structure. Simple and easy. This could be a top website if they just updated the look and feel a little. Nice work, simplicity rules.

snooth wine web design

7 January 2010

Essentially a 3 column design website. Easy search, rating and recommendation. They focused on doing these things really well. Also have excellent SEO, often appear at the top of the organic listings. I do think there is too much going on with the wine consumer pulled in too many ways with ads and boxes, if they’ve having trouble converting sales they should look at the amount of distracting noise on the site.

mywinesdirect website design

12 January 2010

Right then left column design structure. Super interesting navigation and search system, its by wine style rather than region and varietal. The website is deceptively simple, I wonder whether they have done extensive A/B tests of their webpages to see which design converts the best. Respect. I’d love to see their playbook.

How your Wine eCommerce website works Made Simple

15 January 2010

Wine eCommerce websites have three elements: 1. the content e.g. a tasting note or a photo; 2. the presentation e.g. colours, fonts, and columns; 3. the code (or logic) e.g. software that says take this tasting note, use this font and send it to the internet browser (explorer or firefox etc)