We begin every new relationship by listening.  Our team wants to hear your DTC goals – both online and offline.

We want to know your story.

We want to learn about your customers, your wine clubs, and your events.

We want to know about your current systems (eCommerce, calendars, reservations, etc), and if they are meeting your needs.

We want to know about websites you like, and websites you don’t like.

And, of course, we want learn about you.  What is your story? What makes your brand unique? What do you want your website to express to visitors immediately upon arrival?

We put the listening session and our years of experience to work, and we talk to you about the kind of website we think will work best to accomplish your goals, tell your story, and attract your ideal buyer.

If you need advice on a new eCommerce/POS vendor, we will tell you who we think will be your best match, as we are deeply familiar with many (that said, we don’t play favorites with wine eCommerce systems – we work for you, not them).

Once we’ve all decided on platforms, we’ll talk framework and page structure.

Before we start getting our hands dirty with the design, we map out your website and organize your brand collateral – logos, graphics, fonts, copy, tasting notes, press, bottle shots, copy, photography – you name it.  Our goal is to give you a framework for your new website, along with a thoughtful path for the consumer using your website. We also want to identify places where there may be holes in terms of content or photography that can be addressed before we build, instead of waiting for those holes to be filled once the design process is complete.

With photos and copy ready to go, we will begin the winery website design building process.  Typically we begin by working on a homepage design, along with a couple of subpages, and a wine detail page.  Once we get design approval on these pages, we will begin work building out the rest of the site with the new design. When we have all pages built out, we will submit to you for review, then make final changes, as requested.

Once our team has deemed the website “complete”, we will invite your team to test it.  Better yet, we will invite your team to invite people to test it (select wine club members have been known to love this part).

What we are really looking for in this process is we are looking for here are usability issues. Did something confuse your users? Did they go to the page we wanted them to visit when they were done reading copy? Was the font easy to read? Are there any friction points in the checkout process that we can address?

We will take feedback from this testing and make adjustments, if necessary.

Once all of the i’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed, we will launch your new site into its spot in the world wide web.

If your website has a WordPress element to it (most do, unless they are straight WineDirect), we insist on helping you maintain it with our IT services, as we want to make sure your website stays healthy and secure.

We will keep your WordPress plugins up-to-date and install security updates as they roll out.  If your staff is making updates to the website, we will also check in monthly to make sure these changes keep with the integrity of the site – we want sites to stay fast, SEO-smart, and user-friendly. We roll all of this into our website hosting fees.

Additionally, we can continue to work with you, updating your website and store (instead of your staff), studying the your website’s usage via heatmaps and analytics to see how we can adjust on the fly, making your website the reactive and robust online sales tool that we build wine websites to be.

Sit back and relax. You have a beautiful new high-end website that’s selling your wine, and is being maintained – affordably – by a team of experts. Enjoy.