Winery Website Design Tips & Advice

Your website is your most important sales tool. In these posts, we explore what makes winery websites actually perform: from design and UX to SEO, accessibility, mobile, and ecommerce. Whether you're building new or optimizing what you've got, this is where to start.

Inside Bordeaux: How Jane Anson Is Rewriting the Rules of Wine Media

In this first episode of Uncorked, Polly Hammond interviews Jane Anson, longtime Bordeaux expert and founder of the digital platform Inside Bordeaux. After nearly two decades at Decanter, Jane went independent—building a subscription business rooted in deep content, user-first design, and editorial freedom. Their conversation covers the leap from legacy media to entrepreneurship, the nuts…

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Your website probably isn’t accessible

I’m known for my matter-of-fact writing and talking style. I come by it naturally, so I hope readers aren’t offended if I tell them that their websites aren’t accessible, and that’s a dick move. I covered this 2 years ago in my “Don’t be a dick” series. You can read that here: Accessibility, compliance, and…

blue and white Facebook Conversion Tracking Badge

Facebook Conversion Tracking: Commerce7’s secret weapon

Commerce7 has something no other wine DTC platform has: an app dedicated to properly tracking conversions on Facebook. Ok, maybe it’s not so secret… many wineries and agencies alike already use this app and love it. But it never hurts to remind everyone else that it’s available, and why almost every winery should be using…

A picture of a young woman carrying shipment boxes. Text says "Excelling at Ecommerce".

Excelling at Ecommerce, Real Business of Wine Ep. 14

Now more than ever, wineries are looking toward ecommerce to keep the doors open. In this session, we ask leaders in wine website development to share their practical advice and best practices.

Accessibility, compliance, and your winery website

Winery website accessibility is no longer optional. Learn how ADA compliance for wineries and accessible web design improve user experience, boost SEO, and protect your brand while meeting WCAG 2.2 standards.

Mike’s Don’t Be a Dick Series, Part 1: Site Speed

They say speed kills. In this case, a lack of speed kills. I’m talking about the speed of your website. So, what is speed? What exactly is speed relative to? Simply put, website speed refers to the time it takes for your visitors to see your website in their browser, from the moment they click…

What Wine Marketing Can Learn from Video Game Design

Lately, I’ve been pondering my GenX husband’s secret guilty pleasure: MMORPGs, huge multiplayer online games with complex story plots that often rely on community-building to master. Dear Hubby has been a gamer for as long as we’ve been married, and before life got busy with kids and businesses and mortgages, I spent many an evening…

Creating delight and building connections

I’ve decided to eschew the crappy list-ification that you’ll find littering Google when you search Customer Delight, because while those lists might give you some very middle-of-the-road places to start, they don’t help you shift your thinking. Delight is a way of looking at communication and marketing that needs to be embraced by everyone on…

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Kanye & Blind Dates: Tackling the About Us Page

Today, let’s talk about something near and dear to my heart as a wine, beer, and spirits marketer…the single piece of content that sends even the bravest of business people running for the hills: the About Us web copy. I can’t begin to tell you the number of times that I have seen sites stall for lack…

GDPR for Wineries

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is the new data protection law in the EU, it comes into force in May 2018, it has serious penalties, and it applies to data collected about EU citizens from anywhere in the world. This means that pretty much every winery site anywhere needs to care about…

Designing a Better Customer Experience

In a recent article, we talked about the decision-simplicity index, and I received a few emails asking about clear pathways versus the old-school tactic of upselling via meandering paths. “Isn’t it better to encourage people to look around, so maybe they add more to the cart?” Before I answer, I will lead in with a story:…

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Simple truths for better winery websites

Recently, someone (not the client) looked at one of our most thought-out, well-planned, customized sites (with innumerable goal-driven features) and said, “it just looks like a simple site to me.” Honestly, my team was gobsmacked. We had spent months working on discovery and custom development and optimization and testing ….My ego reared its head and…