I recently came across this fabulous post by the well respected Vin65 and thought I’d share it with you: http://www.vin65.com/blog/Top-10-Winery-Website-Must-Haves.

What makes this article so great is each of the ‘Must-Haves’ such as Store Locator, List of Events, and Newsletter Signup is easy to understand and implement on your own site.  The only point I did not immediately agree with was having a mobile version of your site — working with small, boutique and micro wineries like I do, I know many of your budgets are limited and before you try to have a mobile version of your site created, PLEASE check your site analytics and see how many visitors are actually visiting your site from a mobile device.  For most of my clients, mobile visitors make up less then 5% of their over-all visits, which may not be enough to justify the added expense of creating a mobile version of your site.

Google Alerts is a wonderful, free service (you do need to register for a free Google Account) that searches the web for the keyword/keyword phrases you specify and emails you the results.

How is this useful to you? Have it alert you every time your winery, vineyard and/or name is mentioned so you can know what people are saying about you!Sure, you probably already know about any news articles or wine reviews by big name reviewers and magazines, but what about folks who visited you or tasted your wine and have wrote about you in their blogs? This is good information to have because it gives you a realistic picture of what people think of your winery/vineyard/wines. It will also alert you if someone is using your name inappropriately or where your wines are showing up at.

Along with “Rachell Coe” and “4 the Grapes,” I have my Google Alerts set up to notify me every time “oregon wines” and “oregon wineries” is mentioned in the news and Search Engines so I can stay abreast of what is going on.

How to set up:

Log in to your Google account and under ‘Try something new‘ you should see a link called ‘Alerts‘. (If you do not, then just click on ‘More >>‘ which takes you to a page of Google stuff and click on the ‘Alert‘ link.)

You should see this page:

Search terms: enter your keyword or keyword phrase

Type: You can choose from ‘News’, ‘Blog’, ‘Web’, ‘Comprehensive’, ‘Video’ and ‘Group’. I recommend choosing ‘Comprehensive so it will search EVERYTHING!

How often: Here you choose how often you want Google to alert you: ‘as-it-happens’, ‘once a day’ or ‘once a week’. My preference is ‘once a day’

Deliver to: You can have it delivered to your email address or to a feed. I have it set to my email address.

Now just click on ‘Create Alert‘ and you’re done!

According to Wine Business’s article “Consumers are cutting back” gas prices have made consumers want to stay closer to home — which means lower on-premise sales. However, they have noticed that online wine sales are “increasing rapidly.”

How does this effect you?

If You Don’t Have A Shopping Cart:
Well, if you don’t currently have a shopping cart, you may want to think about adding one (and it doesn’t have to be as expensive to add as you may think — I offer a simple order form for around a $100 and more full-featured ecommerce solution for $500). If you are not sure the demand is there, there are several things you can do to try and find out:

• Check your website traffic logs to see how many visitors you have and what pages they are visiting. (If you don’t know what traffic logs are, check with your web person — they should know) If you are getting a lot of visits and people are hanging around on your ‘Wines’ page — seriously consider a shopping cart.
• Have your web person add a simple ‘Poll’ on your site asking visitors if they would buy from your store or not.
• Start collecting email addresses by using a simple ‘Email’ form on your site.

If You Already Have A Shopping Cart:
It may sound redundant, but have someone who is unfamiliar with your shopping cart go through the order process and give you feedback (this is something you could ask and friend or relative). If they have any problems during the order process, discuss it with your web person to see if any issues can be addressed.

You also want to make sure you appear correctly in the Search Engines — especially Google! If you aren’t where you feel you should be, talk to your web person to see if they can ‘Optimize’ your website.

And you may want to consider finding where on the Internet your wines appear (like at Wines.com and so forth) and make sure they have updated descriptions of your wine along with a picture of the label or bottle. The reason for this is if a consumer is going through a site such as ‘Wines.com’ and they run across your wine, without a picture and/or description to go with it they may move on to the next wine.

One thing I run into a lot are files being sent to me with spaces in the file name (this seems to happen most often with images and pdf files). On your local computer this may be fine, but once its uploaded to the Internet you would be surprised to know that many people won’t be able to view it!

This is because many servers don’t know how to read a space (ever seen %20 in place of the space in your filename? Its the server’s way of handling the space) and so instead of viewing your file they will get the dreaded “Page/File cannot be found” error. So rule of thumb? Don’t put spaces in your file names!