REthink Wine Blog

Kiz Dodds posted an article about sustainable farming earlier this month, and we’ve also had other blogs on similar subjects before. As our winery partnerships grow, we continue to meet more and more of wineries going green or greener. Who doesn’t want to save Mother Earth?!

But going green isn’t just limited to the vineyards and the grapes. It can happen anywhere. You can help the cause by driving a hybrid car to work every day. You can reduce our oil dependency by utilizing solar and wind power for your energy consumption. You can even save our planet by using recycled and green products as part of your business. And having said that, here are just a few of the many businesses out there trying to help others get green(er):

Greenerprinter
www.greenerprinter.com
Based in Berkeley, CA, you can have all of your collaterals, business cards, postcards, etc printed on recycled paper using soy and vegetable based ink in their 100% wind-powered plant.

The Green Office
www.thegreenoffice.com
Not only do they sell green office supplies from paper to furniture, they also have Webinards to help guide you go green.

Bay Area Green Business Program
www.greenbiz.ca.gov
Registered green businesses broken down by county and services. You can hire a green construction company, or you can have a green bakery cater your next event.

These are just a few examples. If you put on the thinking cap and do the research, I have no doubt that every part of a winery’s operation can be green. Every little bit helps and everything counts. And don’t forget to recycle!!!

Heard something brilliant the other day when I was discussing ecommerce “best practices” with someone at the office. “It’s just shopping” she said. And it all makes sense. We all know how to shop in the real world (and know what we like and don’t like about certain stores), so why should an ecommerce shopping cart be any different?

Over the years, I’ve heard and read so many different articles with different views on how the cart should work on a website, and what are the “best practices” today. Not last month. Today.  Well, considering how much time I spent building ecommerce sites, and how much money I spent shopping on ecommerce sites, I’d like to throw my 2 cents into the mix. Here are my top 10 “how the shopping cart should work”.

1. Use a dynamic shopping cart
When you’re grocery shopping, you wouldn’t want to be sent straight to the cashier every time you put something in your cart. So don’t take the customers away from where they are when they click the “add to cart” button. Let them decide where they want to go next.

2. Allow quantity when adding to cart
There’s nothing stopping you from putting 2 bags of marshmallows in your cart, so why should it work differently on any website?

3. Include a store navigation accessible from anywhere in the site
When you’re ready to move from the produce section to the frozen meats, you don’t always go back to the store’s entrance and start over do you?

4. Include related products on product pages
Not on the shopping cart page. Not on the review your order page. On the product detail page. That way you know the ketchup and mustard are both condiments (related), and you don’t end up seeing one of them sitting next to the paper towels.

5. Forms should be top aligned
UI studies show it is easier and faster to fill out forms if the names of the fields are directly above them. So you work on the form from top to bottom, rather than left, right, left, right, left right, … You get my point.

6. Specify optional fields, not required fields
Most fields are required anyway.

7. Shipping address should be an optional step
9 out of 10 customers ship to the same address as their billing address. Don’t put up the entire shipping address form just to intimidate them. The less work they have to do, the more likely they’ll actually finish the checkout process.

8. Ability to save carts
I know you can’t do this in the grocery store, but don’t you wish you can? So you can put together your cart for next week’s grocery since you’re already in the store, and all you have to do is to come back next week to the store and pay for it.

9. Large buttons
I love it when I get to Home Depot, all I have to do is look up and know exactly where I am suppose to find what I need and pay for things when I’m done. Make your “add to cart” and “checkout” buttons stand out. Please.

10. Beauty is important
White space is good, but too much of it is bad. Wouldn’t a badly designed site and checkout forms make you a little uncomfortable? Maybe it’s not a legitimate site? Maybe it’s not secure? Maybe I should go to someone else whose store “looks” better?

So I am a few months late, but I finally got an iPhone and spent a good amount of time exploring all the difference tools they have in the iPhone. Oh, did I also mention that I am very impatient when it comes to learning as well? Now why is that important to this blog?

Well, whenever I get something new, like a new phone, a new piece of software, or even visiting a new website, I don’t have the patience to “learn” how they work. I want everything to be intuitive and follow common sense, some of you call it best practice. Bottom line is - life’s short and I don’t have all the time in the world to be learning a new interface every time something like a new phone comes out.

This brings me to 2 points I want to make in this entry:

1. User interface has to be consistent. Going through the iPhone tools, I realized that all the tools were probably built by different departments (that don’t talk to each other) because the way to get from one place to another is so inconsistent, each tool has its own way of getting around. I don’t know about you, but that annoys the heck out of me. Not only do I have to learn how the iPhone works, I have to learn about how each tool works.

This applies to websites as well. If the navigation scheme changes from page to page, you can bet your visitors will leave your site in seconds. It might sound like a fun idea to “spice things up”, but it’s not.

2. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Some of the new features in the iPhone are awesome! I didn’t understand why the same great features or the ways to get around weren’t carried throughout the entire portfolio of tools. Somebody on one of the development teams must have thought “Why follow the crowd. I’m unique in my own way”, and boy did he screw up.

Again, same with your website. People have learned how to shop online for more than a decade, and have pretty much been “trained” to follow a certain pattern. So don’t try to “invent” something new when it comes to your sales. This is the one place where creativity may work against you.

These thick lenses on my glasses are not from the late night studying in college or from reading the entire Jane Austen collection in my poorly lit bedroom. They are the result of growing up in the “Age of Advertisement” - watching way too much TV when I was a kid. And of course, commercials were my favorite. Soon after graduating college, I joined one of the biggest advertising firms in New York, and my life became nothing but “Sell! Sell! Sell!”

Unfortunately along with the glamour came the discovery of “the truth” - not everything they say in the ads are true! (I am sure you are more than aware of that already. THAT is advertising.)

So what does the Web have to do with Darwinism?

Out of curiosity, I purposely made a list of the last 20+ things I bought - from a new suitcase to Japanese curry mix - and why I picked that particular brand/product over all the others on the same shelf. What I realized is that more than half of the things I bought were recommended to me in the past from people I know who have given their thumbs up.

So what does my little non-scientific research mean?

As many of you have heard over and over again, the Web has given “people” a voice - people who actually bought and used the products; People who were not paid by the producers to, on occasion, exaggerate or fabricate; People like you and me.

Recommendation will be single force that drives sales in an age where “the truth” about a product will sell it. Not how big your marketing campaign budget is. “We” will no longer listen to “the man” who makes the stuff. “We” will listen to the hundreds and thousands of people who actually bought the stuff, and “we” want to hear what they have to say about it.

So in the end, “survival of the fittest” will become the new model of e-commerce because very soon, only the best products will sell.

Here’s a final thought - spend the money on product development and listen to what the people have to say about your products. Put your ego aside and improve your products - give people what they want. Stop wasting money on hiring some guy to make your products sound good. Make them good.

I’ve been getting these same questions from day to day and I don’t blame anyone for asking them. It’s like hearing your friends talk about iPhone and all of a sudden you have to have one yourself. Or learning about Bluetooth for the first time, and the next thing you know, your oven talks to your computer over Bluetooth. New technology is exciting, but it doesn’t mean you have to build one from the ground up.

So what’re the questions I keep getting time and time again?

“Can you build me a blog?”

“Can you build me a social network?”

“Can you build a video player for my website?”

etc. etc. etc.

My answer is always the same. If the purpose of these new “toys” is to drive traffic back to your website, then “if you build it and they will come” is nothing but daydreaming. Use tools, great tools, that already exist out there for everything you can think of under the sun. These tools not only give you more features than you could possible dream to use, they also provide you entry to something bigger, a bigger audience, a bigger pool of potential visitors to your websites.

Take youTube for example. Why host your videos on your own site, and pray that someday, someone is going to stumble across your videos when you can upload them to youTube, and instantly, you have millions of viewers doing all kinds of keyword searches, and might just be looking for video clips on wineries, wine tasting, or what have you? Same goes for your blog. Being a part of a blog community is great. Most blogs will let you be part and sign up for different communities, groups of people who are blogging about the same topic, with feeds flying all over the Internet.

So don’t reinvent the wheel. It defeats the purpose (driving traffic back to your site), and you’re spending money on building a tool that will never stand up to what’s already out there (youTube, Flickr, Word Press, the list goes on and on).

TGIF! Why not start this weekend with some laughs. Check out all the unusual (I think outrageously hilarious) wine labels on http://www.winelabels.org/labels.htm. So glad to know that there are plenty of people with a sense of humor out there. Don’t forget to click on “continue to the next page” on the bottom because you don’t want to miss what’s on the other pages.

Happy Friday!

When it comes to painting your new bedroom or your new website, how do you choose colors that “match” (you have 16.7 million colors on your computer monitor) and deliver that certain feeling that you are looking for? Well, you can spend a few years in a design school and learn all about color theory, or you can jump on to a few paint supply websites and get some great ideas.

www.sherwin-williams.com/do_it_yourself/ and click on “Launch Color Visualizer”

www.behr.com/behrx/workbook/ and click on “Start Color Smart”

www.valspar.com/coordinate-colors.html and get ideas based on ambience, architecture or color

www.benjaminmoore.com/ and find “Color Help”

www.prattandlambert.com/design_inspirations/ click on “Color Visualizer” and the engine will recommend colors that go well with any color you select.

Go crazy!

You came across them in your inbox. You opened them and clicked on the “Download Images” bar in Outlook. You smiled. You took out your credit card and the next thing you know, you spent $200 that you don’t have on some new shoes.

Effective email campaigns are dangerous (to consumers like you and I). Want to see some effective ones, the ones that made you put in some overtime at work to pay for the credit card bills?

http://smith-harmon.com/blog/

Some consistent themes for effective emails:
1. 1 or 2 main focus. Have more to say? Get that in the next email.
2. Strong photography helps!
3. Include links to your website just in case if someone’s not in the mood to buy shoes, but they really want a new shirt.
4. Some text will help avoid being marked as spam, and in case someone’s too lazy to click on the “Download Images” bar in Outlook.

Look through your inbox. If you’ve spent money after opening a good marketing email, learn from it, and in no time you will be sending off effective emails and making sales too!

Before you click on the links below, you have to promise that you won’t call your designers right away and ask them to build you a flashy website (FYI, these’ll cost you a big chunk of change). The websites you are about to see here are cool and fun, but you won’t sell a thing on your site if you build one like these. and forget about coming up on search engines results. Search engines are blind, and they won’t be able to read anything that’s on these sites.

Still, these are great to look at, and certainly will keep you entertained for a few hours (or until your eyes get tired from staring at the screen).

http://www.linkdup.com/

http://www.thefwa.com/

I remember when the “Web” first started, and all we had was a browser that displayed text. Of course, if you’re full of imagination, you might enjoy reading about how beautifully the dinner plate was presented and how everything looked as if they were cooked to perfection.  And with a little bit of imagination, you started to get a little hungry, and wished you were eating what you were reading about.

Not me. One, I hate reading (sorry Mom and Dad! (who were both literature teachers)). I’d rather spend 2 hours watching a movie than spend 20 hours reading a book. Two, we’re living in the age of sensory overload. Don’t tell me about it, just show me.

Not that I ever ordered anything from Allen Brothers, but if you can honestly tell me that these pictures don’t make your mouth water (unless you’re a vegetarian), I will gladly delete this post.  A picture tells a thousand words, especially when you’re trying to sell something. Seeing is believing. Spend some major dollars on product shots, location shots, even your family and press photos. They will make a world of difference in how the rest of the world perceives your business.

Photography, sometimes for the same product, dictates where I make the final purchase for that product. Yes, it is THAT important.