REthink Wine Blog

Paul posted a piece here yesterday introducing the brix CMS which we have released as open source. This is exciting news for the developer community, but what does it mean for the rest of us who may only access a CMS as a user? I’ve been using brix while it’s been in development and have appreciated some great features which I’d like to briefly describe here and which may be coming soon to a web application near you.

A Flexible Multi-Template CMS

Like many CMS brix allows you to run your site off a template that displays different content on each page. In the case of brix, you can set up multiple templates and associate each page of content with any template you choose. You can even have a template that contains other templates. This means that a single site can easily contain pages that have different layouts and designs providing maximum flexibility while maintaining the efficiency of a templated site.

File structure and page edit pane. Click image for larger version and description.

Tiles

In brix every piece of dynamic content is controlled by a tile and each tile is represented by simple tag in a page or template. No messy code, no java or php or xml to clutter up templates and pages, just HTML and tags like <brix:content> or <brix:tile id="foo">. This means that any page can contain any piece of dynamic content, and that content can appear anywhere on the page. In the brix demo there are tiles for display of the current time, and also for a form into which you can enter a ticker symbol and get the current stock quote. You could have both of these bits of content on a single page together, or on different pages surrounded by text or images or whatever. Because dynamic content is a simple modular piece you can use it where you want, how you want.

Creating a new tile in brix. Click image for larger version and description.

Menu configuration panel. Click image for larger version and description.

Snapshots and Prototypes

Ever make a mistake in a CMS? Or want to save the content and configuration of your site before trying out some changes? Snapshots allow you to save the current state of the CMS as a timestamped snapshot including all content, files, and configuration so that you can restore the site to that state later on. A prototype is a snapshot that you can name and that is shared by all sites running the same brix. This feature is great for creating “themes” to be easily installed through the CMS.

WebDAV Access

As good as any CMS can be, it’s still a web based application and the web is not the best interface for editing content. All files and content in the CMS are accessible via webDAV so that you can work in a desktop based text editor rather than a web browser text area. This feature alone makes brix many times more efficient than any other CMS I’ve used.

Those are just a few features that have made brix so great to work with. Although it was a thrill being one of the few people to be able to get my hands dirty working with this tool I’m even happier now that it’s been open sourced and others will have the opportunity to explore, experiment and find useful applications for brix. If you’d like to know more about brix or have any questions about it leave a comment and let me know.

At this year’s Inertia symposium I moderated a session on web site design in which we talked about the wonders of social networking and how it might benefit wineries. Facebook, blogging, twitter: we invoked these words in praise and wonder. But just two weeks ago our own Carole Loomis posted an article, So You Think You Want To Blog starting with the advice, “Think Again”. Two years ago Paul Mabray posted Wineries - to blog or not to blog - NOT whose title is self explanatory. I myself have never before encouraged wineries to blog, advising that blogging is a distraction from more important marketing efforts. So why was I bullish on blogging last week?

First of all, I blame Gary Vaynerchuk (pictured) of Wine Library TV. He delivered an inspiring talk at our symposium shaming the audience for ignoring blogs and social networking and saying that every winery had an obligation to blog or see their business go the way of the dinosaur. He exhorted wineries to stop whining about being defined by reviewers and the press and start defining themselves by expressing their own brand online through blogs and social networks. Gary’s persuasive talk had a lot to do with my attitude toward blogging all day, and has stayed with me since then.

Also, times have changed since Paul posted his warnings about blogging two years ago. Facebook is a multi-billion dollar business and has become a primary communication platform for many people. Barack Obama is the first serious presidential candidate to be able to turn down public financing largely because of his success raising funds online with the help of political bloggers. Bloggers have caught up to print and broadcast journalists as sources of news, analysis and opinion. Vaynerchuk has become a powerful force in the wine world thanks almost entirely to his online presence in video blogging and social networking. This blog has had some success in connecting Inertia to the larger wine community. The ways in which we connect to information and each other are more and more tied to networking services on the web.

So should wineries hop on the bandwagon? For the first time I now say: yes. But before you all go signing up for blogger accounts I have some words of advice on how to get started.

1. Start reading blogs: You wouldn’t sit down to write a novel without ever cracking a book. Read as many blogs as you can and get a feel for the craft of blogging. There may even be blogs unrelated to wine that you can learn from.
2. Be Promiscuous: Now that you’re regularly reading a bunch of blogs, join the conversation. Leave comments stating your point of view. Don’t explicitly promote yourself or your business - you won’t make friends by getting a reputation as a spammer. Instead use this opportunity to get engaged with the community and start finding your online “voice”.
3. Get Social: There’s a bunch of wine related groups on Facebook, as well as the Open Wine Consortium, which let’s you post blog articles, list your events and engage in community forums. One of the main benefits of blogging is community building and social networks give you the opportunity to do this with much less overhead than a blog you have to maintain yourself.
4. Do some research: One of the best things about the web is that there is so much information out there about the web. Problogger, Blog Herald and Copy Blogger are good places to find information on blogging and to get a sense of the issues that bloggers deal with.

Follow these steps and you’ll be engaging potential customers, creating a brand around your online presence and joining a growing community of wine consumers and producers and you haven’t even got a blog yet. When you’re ready to take it to the next level you’ll have to choose a platform, come up with a site design, get a domain and then put in the hours actually writing content day after day, all while keeping the rest of your business going. Yes, it’s going to require a bigger investment of time than emailing your current customer base or updating your website content every quarter and you’re not going to be able to let go of those old responsibilities either. Perhaps my point of view isn’t that different from that stated by Carole and Paul in their posts on blogging. They have a valid point: given the colossal effort involved, why bother blogging? All I’m saying is: when blogging gives you unprecedented power to connect with a growing audience on your own terms, why not?

Have questions on winery blogging issues? Let me know in the comments and I’ll follow up on this topic in the future.

Thanks to everybody who attend the Web Design breakout session at our recent Inertia Symposium and especially to presenters Dom Moreci of Plumbline Studios and Aaron Rutledge & Tom Ajello of Poke New York. We didn’t get through all of the slides that the Pokers prepared, so I’ve made them available online. So go take a look at the 10 Commandments of Web Design.

UPDATE: I’ve taken down the slides for now while the folks at Poke update the presentation. Stay tuned for a new improved set of slides to be posted soon.

Sometimes it helps to take a step back and look at a familiar issue from a different angle. I’m used to thinking about usability as it pertains to web design and application development but earlier this week I got the opportunity to think about usability in a different context: the supermarket meat case. I’m a member of a food coop, a not for profit supermarket which offers a much lower markup on items in exchange for a small investment and a commitment from members to work a shift in the store once a month. On my shift this week I stocked the meat case and found different ways this part of the supermarket had been designed to make it more usable.

Make It Possible

At the lowest level usability is just about making it possible for people to accomplish certain tasks. When stocking new items in the meat case I rotated the stock; this means placing the new fresh items behind the items already on the shelf, ensuring that customers will buy older items first. If the fresh items were in front it would be almost impossible for customers to buy the older stock first and those items might go bad before customers had a chance to purchase them. This is the most important kind of usability – if the user cannot perform the task you want then your website or application could be simply useless.

Make it Easy

A higher level of usability is about making tasks easy. Stacking packages of ground meat back to front with the label clearly visible makes it easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for. There’s already a sticker on the shelf under each product with the name and price listed, but the label on a product package is easier to see. If the packages were stacked on top of each other the label might be visible, but only if the shopper were standing right next to it. A label facing out is apparent even at a distance and easy to reach. Usability engineering of this kind creates an experience that is pleasant rather than just functional.

Eliminate Error

This is related to my last point but requires even more focus on the customer’s experience. There were two similar items I was stocking: ground turkey and all white meat ground turkey breast. The brand was the same and the packages looked almost identical except for the wording of the product name on the label. The normal procedure would be to put similar items next to each other but in this case that would create a situation where a shopper could easily make an error, not seeing the difference between the two products. I was instructed by a supervisor to put a different product, turkey cutlets, between the two kinds of ground turkey. This made a physical distinction between the two kinds of ground turkey and forced the shopper into making a more conscious choice between one or the other.

The designer of the ground turkey packages should have considered this and given the two products different colored labels. I compensated for poor usability in the product design by practicing good usability in product placement. Sometimes there are elements of a web design that cannot be changed for better usability; in these cases it’s important to find ways to compensate through other means.

(Super)Market Segmentation

Usability in the supermaket is different than on the web because markets have been around for a long time and most people have developed a predictable set of behaviors around shopping for food. Even so, different people shop differently and supermarkets cater to the behaviors of their own particular customers. My coop is very different from a large chain supermarket. In some ways I have had to change my habitual behaviors in order to shop there, but I’m willing to do so because I feel the coop offers something valuable I can’t get elsewhere: great produce and food items, inexpensive prices and a feeling of being part of a community with values I share.

Sometimes different models of usability crop up on the web that force people to change their habits. Google mail is a different way of interacting with email than a desktop email client, but the value proposition of universally accessible email and massive storage convinced many to change their behaviors slightly.

Having a great product with a clear value proposition will always be most important, although a great product is better when it’s easy and fun to pick it up off the shelf.

There’s an addition to our feed links over at the bottom of the sidebar: Twitter. If an RSS feed wasn’t good enough for you now you can see Rethink Wine Blog updates via twitter at twitter.com/RethinkWineBlog or on your phone, or IM or 3rd party app or however you roll in Twitterspace. This is all thanks to twitterfeed which lets you create tweets from any RSS feed.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter…..well it’s hard to explain. It’s sort of like micro-blogging meets public instant messaging. It’s become extremely popular with everybody from the New York Times to Darth Vader getting involved. Find out more at the Twitter FAQ.

Recently there was a comment from one of our loyal blog readers, El Jefe, saying that he was having trouble reading the text on the blog posts. After considering his complaint I’ve gone ahead and increased the font size and darkened the text so it contrasts more with the page background and is (I hope) easier to read. I care about making our content as accessible as possible to as many readers as possible so this was a change I was happy to make.

So do any other ReThink readers have suggestions, comments, pet peeves etc.? Is there something you want more of on this blog? Something that’s always bugged you but not quite enough to post a comment? We keep writing posts on this blog for you, those in the wine and/or web community that are interested in what we have to say. So feel free to give us feedback, now and at any time in the future. We’re listening.

Recently Paul posted with downloads of some of the slideshows from our Symposium last month. I realized that my presentation was pretty light on the slides (I tried to follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule) and so would not make much sense to somebody who had not attended the symposium. Thus I here offer the slideshow in quicktime movie format with a poorly produced but no less insightful audio commentary track. It’s not the same as my talk at the symposium but should at least provide context for the slides.

So go ahead and Download the Content Presentation.

We’re big fans of Web Standards here at IBG so it was gratifying to see BusinessWeek’s article, Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards. Zeldman has been instrumental in advocating for the use of web standards in browsers and by web designers and developers. In the bad old days different browsers rendered sites in different ways forcing developers to code several versions of the same web site. Thanks to the institution of a standard set of web practices (including technologies such as HTML for content and CSS for style) developers can code once and users can expect to see web sites looking the way they are supposed to no matter what browser they have. Some folks still aren’t totally on board with standards (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) but some degree of standards compliance is now the norm for browsers and web sites.

The benefits of web standards are manifold: greater accessibility, lower bandwidth overhead, greater efficiency in development and redesign, consistency into the future and more. Jeffrey Zeldman showed web developers, myself included, the basics of web standards in his book Designing With Web Standards and continues to fight the good fight on his website and as publisher and creative director of the web standards focused webzine A List Apart. The BusinessWeek article gives a more in depth look at Zeldman than I’ve done here and includes a slide show that serves as a brief primer on some aspects of web standards.

On a related note: I’m going to be attending the An Event Apart conference co-hosted by Jeffrey Zeldman later this month. I hope to report back with new ideas on best practices that will help improve the experience of our clients and their customers – in a standards compliant way of course.

There’s been a lot of talk on this blog about social networks lately – it’s an exciting area of the web and one of the new leaders in the field is Facebook. Facebook started out as a social networking tool exclusively for college students but has recently opened its doors to the public at large. I signed up for a facebook account recently and am already impressed with its functionality. More importantly I feel I’ve learned about what social networks and the web in general can do most effectively. Here are the lessons I’ve learned and how they can be applied to wineries online:

Design Should Serve Content

One thing I like about Facebook is the way that the pages are structured. Different components like messages, updates, profile info, etc. are laid out in a predictable and manageable way. The focus is on clearly communicating the information that is likely to be most important. Everybody’s page has the same structure and look which makes it easier to see differences in content. This is very different from myspace where individuals customize their pages with so much imagery, music, video etc. that often it’s difficult to know where to look.

I see it this way: myspace is about individual expression, facebook is about individuals communicating. As such facebook is better placed to take advantage of the internet which is essentially a communication technology.

Lesson for wineries: Distinctive branding is great but the message and functionality of your website is even more important to online customers.

Social Networks Are Best At Enhancing Existing Relationships

I’m not sure that networks can be truly created through the internet. Facebook took off because it hooked into societies that already existed: college campuses. These networks were finite, geographically specific and already full of activity in the offline world. With its expanded audience Facebook is still serving existing societies in the form of “networks”, be they regional areas, colleges or workplaces. I’m not making new friends so much as strengthening connections with people I already know.

Anthropologists have surmised that we can only have relationships with 150 people at a time, a holdover from our prehistoric societies of kinship clans. Tightening up this group may be more satisfying that expanding it beyond our innate ability feel connected to so many people. Networks evolve and expand but in a gradual organic fashion.

Lesson for wineries: I’m bearish on wineries creating their own social networks since this requires creating relationships online from scratch. What networks already exist that you can tap into either online or off? Maybe you can find your college fellows online and invite them to participate in a special promotion of one of your wines. A regional network may provide an ideal audience for winery events.

There’s Always Something New

In facebook you are constantly updated when there’s activity going on with any of your friends. This is actually the most prominent part of your facebook home page and it’s extremely satisfying to feel up to date in this way. I can see when my friends add other friends, when they change their profile, when they join a network or add a piece of functionality to their page - and I can see it all in one place.

Lesson for wineries: Keep your audience feeling current with your news. Update the news on your website, change your homepage content to reflect what’s going on now at your winery, share current information with your customers through email newsletters. Nothing strengthens a relationship like finding out something new about somebody. This is where Facebook excels and the web (and of course easy content management like in our REthink Engine) allows you to likewise share new information as often as you’d like.

In an earlier post I talked about treating your site users like customers and visitors. Take a tip from Facebook and treat them like friends.

“User” is a technical term describing any entity that interacts with a piece of software or a website but it doesn’t speak to what wineries want to acheive on the web. As many have pointed out the only other group of people we refer to as “users” are drug addicts. So the term hardly connotes the respect that those who go to wine websites deserve. If we do away with the user, what word should we use instead? I have two suggestions.

Be Our Guest

The wine industry is in many ways a hospitality business. So why not think of your website users as guests just as you would those who visit your winery or sample your wine in a tasting room? Focusing on guests may change how we think about the goals of a wine website. You want to make your guests feel at home so ease of use is crucial. You also want to be perceived as a good host so it’s important to express some personality in the content of the site, but not so as to make your guest uncomfortable. So now the person browsing the site feels comfortable and taken care of, what then? This leads to my second suggestion.

They’re Always Right

Those who come to a wine website are also customers. They may be there specifically to buy wine online or they may just be finding out about a wine in preparation for a future purchase. Either way they are just as much a customer as if they were standing at your tasting room’s cash register. So how should you treat customers online? Make sure that products are accessible and clearly labeled with plenty of relevant information, make it as easy as possible for customers to find what they’re looking for and make a purchase, and maintain relationships to encourage repeat customers.

I Am Not a Number

Users are faceless, just numbers on a page of statistics. Designing, developing or maintaining a website for users is difficult but focusing on guests and customers helps guide what a website should be doing and how it should be doing it. So what are you doing for your guests? How are you satisfying your customers?