MyLocalWineStore» Wine Web Design

How your Wine eCommerce website works Made Simple

Bruce — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:45:25 +0000

Wine eCommerce websites have three elements:

the content e.g. a tasting note or a photo
the presentation e.g. colors, fonts, and columns
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)

Back in the nineties things were simple. You just had one page with simple code called html that did all three things.

So I would write

Hello

and this would create a paragraph with Hello in it. At the top of the page, invisible to the reader, would be code that said any text that was between

and

should use, say, verdana font / 10 size.

In other words the content and the how the content should look would be on the same page.

Things then got a little more tricky and you could say look in this special file (called a cascading style sheet or css file) and that file will tell you how to present the data.

Don’t worry I’m not going to get more technical than that!

In the late nineties I remember I walked into the web development agency and the technical guy was, well, frankly over excited. He explained to me a concept called database driven websites.

So whereas before you had the presentation file split out from the web page, now you had the content split out. This time it was put into a database.

The web page would now say

get me this content from the database
get me how it should look from the presentation css file
put it together and send it to the browser.

This last part is the code. (And it actually resides on the server but not the browser).

So that’s a real short overview of web technology.

That’s why you can change the look and feel so easily.

Its why you can have millions of pieces of data and only a few web pages. Because all that’s happening is the website (actually the web server) is pulling together the three sources into one page, and sending (or serving) it to your browser.

Nowadays you allow third party applications or apps to interact with your website. So you connect your website to PayPal, Fedex, Google Analytics etc. It’s called an API.

But that can be another post.

What do you want to know most about the technical side of your wine eCommerce website?

mywinesdirect website design

Bruce — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:10:17 +0000

“Fine Wine at Great Prices. Expertly screened by a panel. Free shipping. Discount wine and Wine Sales.”

Savvy operators. Along with wine.com I’d rate these guys at the top of the industry Search Engine Marketing (SEM) game.

Note: the blue-grey black bordered boxes are my overlay of the website design structure, almost always Header, Body Column(s), then Footer.

Their home page has a right column structure

mywinesdirect Home Page Design

Then they use a left column structure for the product pages

mywinesdirect Product Page Design

Other notable features

super interesting navigation and search system, its by wine style rather than region and varietal (maybe because they offer lots of private label brands?)
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.

snooth wine web design

Bruce — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:02:51 +0000

More of a portal or mall for wine stores and wineries than a direct competitor.

They charge the wine store 10% of any sale to be a featured wine store (an “affiliate” model) and offer advertising. They would be the classic “coopetition” you compete and co0perate with them.

Their home page is a 3 column design

Snooth wine website home page

The product page is essentially 3 column with a big box on top of the left two columns

snooth Product Page Design

Other notable features

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
Offers the wine drinker the ability to get ratings and reviews from stores and drinkers all round the world.
You can compare prices and get recommendations.
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.

One of my favs.

BevMo wine web design

Bruce — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:25:31 +0000

Arguably the largest in the market because of its offline chain of stores in western US.

It boasts a huge selection of wines at cheap prices that can be picked up at the local BevMo. Also note the pick up your order in 1 hour, something in that for local wine retailers for sure.

Note: the blue-grey black bordered boxes are my overlay of the website design structure, almost always Header, Body Column(s), then Footer.

Their home page design is a left column structure

Bevmo Home Page Design

Their product page is a 3 column structure

Bevmo Product Page Design

Other notable design features

very simple but not busy and draws you to the few deals they’re offering
navigation is easy, obvious and ‘filterable’
I’m not sure if they need that third column in the product pages
the product detail page is very simple with some ratings
I guess you see the reviews if you’re part of ClubBev? If so then goes against social media principles.
this could be a top website if they just updated the look and feel a little

Nice work, simplicity rules.

How would you rate this website?

K&L Wines website design

Bruce — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:20:45 +0000

“1000s of Rare and Collectable Wines from around the globe…”
Californian, 3 large stores, switched on state player, almost a chain wine store operator.

Note: the blue-grey, black-bordered boxes are my overlay of the website design structure, almost always Header, Body Column(s), then Footer.

Their home page is a left column design

[I've deleted the picture. The problem is I can't show the footer in a screen shot without the website looking strange, and I don't want to unintentionally insult these guys so perhaps check it out yourself.]

Likewise their products pages

K&L Wines Product Page Design

Other notable design features

Nice clean design with an easy filterable navigation.
Looks they’ve got good solid marketing skills with various web features clearly shown and not too much promotion going on
The real time inventory is a big financial investment – these guys are serious players
Some really good reviews
Sharp website, at first I thought it was magento based but looking at the code it seems unlikely

Some great hard work gone in by the people behind this, showing that its often 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration to get these websites done well.

Have a thirst quenching sauvignon blanc on me, you deserve it.