Australian web design case studies from e-CBD — how we do it...

Each month e-CBD showcases a website we've recently built so you can get a better idea of how we go about providing our clients with a web presence. This month it's Melbourne wine gurus Winelarder

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This month's showase

Client: Winelarder
Website: http://www.winelarder.com.au
Total cost of job: $4500



Winelarder sells premium Australian cleanskin wines (cleanskins are wines bought from producers and sold with a generic label at discounted prices, but we won't go into that now. For more information visit Winelarder's cleanskins page). The business has two retail shops in Melbourne which are doing really well, but they realised their product was the kind of thing people would probably buy online and they really wanted to get an e-commerce website happening, so they came to e-CBD.

Here's what they wanted

• A really, really good looking website — their customers have excellent taste and would expect something pretty
• A fully functioning online store which allowed people to buy wine online using their credit cards
• The ability to make updates and changes to the site themselves, add new products, change prices, list special offers, that kind of thing
• A members area with secure login where special clients could sign up for special deals and corporate clients could send their people and feel at home
• A site search so users who want a 2004 Chardonnay from King River, or whatever, can see if there's something available
• High visibility in the search engines, because it's no use having an online store if no-one can find it right?

Here's what we did for them

Winelarder's requirements were pretty simliar to most other businesses in their position — they'd been trading for a little while, had a good local customer base, but really wanted to expand and reach a wider audience by using the power of the Internet. We get to provide solutions for people like Winelarder all the time, and we're kind of good at it, so we were happy to step up to the plate (or was that the goblet?) and help them out.

Requirement #1 — Good looking website

It's not always easy to put together something which looks great and functions well, whenever we see a flash intro page we cringe and click the 'skip' button and wonder what ego-drugs the designer was on when he thought people wanted to watch a five hour movie showcasing everything he/she learnt at Uni, people don't want to see that, not in an online store anyway, that want everything at their fingertips, straight away. Anyway. As a basis for the Winelarder site we built a smooth, well categorised drop-down menu system for Winelarder and we put the latest and most best-practice CSS principles into action to seperate their content from the prettiness. We also sourced some great wine and vine pics from around the place and used a sexy, round-edged border theme thing to go with the whole wine concept. Have a look at the site anyway, you'll see how nice it is. We like it, they like it, everyone likes it, too easy.

Requirement #2, #3, #4 and #5

We've been using a program called Website Weaver by Queensland technology solutions provider Golden Orb for almost eight years now. When it comes to building online stores it's the bee's knees. Basically, it's a content management system which integrates fully with a whole bunch of e-commerce gateways and banks and it also allows the client to make updates using easy-to-use templates. We've got clients all around the country using it and none of them have any html or tricky coding knowledge and they make changes to their websites all the time and they love it. Winelarder are no different. We do the design and then plug it into Website Weaver and it does the rest — feedback forms, searches, secure areas, member's sections, you name it. There are other systems out there which do a similar thing, but none of them are as secure as Website Weaver and it's all 100% local Queensland technology. which is great. If you want to know more about it give us a call on 07 5531 3810 and we'll put you in touch with some clients who are using it and they can tell you how good it is.

Requirement #6 — High visibility

Search engines, we love them, people love them, we're really good at getting people to the top of them. Winelarder wanted to be on the first page of Google and Yahoo and NineMSN when people searched for 'Cleanskins'. Some other firm said they could do it for around about $5000 (that's the search engine positioning thing, that wasn't even talking about web design). We laughed at them and called them silly and expensive. "Tony," we said (Tony is the head of Winelarder). "Give us six hours and we'll put you there". He said "OK". So we spent six hours making sure all the keywords were in the right place, and making sure that there were lots of links to the site, and all sorts of other smart, ethical things (you can read more about our search engine positioning services here) and then, soon enough, they were right where they wanted to be. Do a cleanskins search in Google and you'll see them there on the front page. Anyway, they get a few hundred people coming to them from search engines each month, so they're pretty happy.

And that's pretty much it really. If you like the sound (and the look) of all that, contact us and we'd be happy to talk about your website...