Winery Websites and Hosting Service

More Details

OK, you've read the Winery Website Features page. Now you want the details. Well, you won't be disappointed.

If you haven't yet read our white paper on the Hosted Services Model, you may want to do that to understand why we're different from a run-of-the-mill web development company. If you need convincing that you need a professional to develop your website, please read our Brother-in-Law Syndrome white paper.

The following sections contain details of our services. It is a long document as our services are comprehensive and robust -- as we like to say "small winery value with a large winery feature set." For those of you who are detail-oriented, this document can be printed and reviewed. We've attempted to reduce the technical jargon in this document, but this sometimes could not be avoided. If you have any questions after reading this, please contact us.

Contents: click the link to skip to that section, or just continue reading

• Advanced Content Management
• Website Customization & Design
• Wine Clubs
• Blog
• Customer Management
• Reporting
• Email Campaign Management
• Mobile Website
• Domain Name
• Email Accounts
• Traffic Statistics
• Server Space
• Data Center Infrastructure

Advanced Content Management

There are three major components to an effective website: design, content and business logic. The design should be pleasing, reflect the winery's unique style, and allow easy navigation through the site. The content on the website must be sufficient and current to allow any type of visitor to accomplish what they came there to do. The business logic must provide appropriate functionality to the website. Much has been written on developing effective websites and a rating scale has even been developed for winery websites. Best practices in the information technology industry advocate the separation of presentation (design) from the content, from business logic, and WineWeb does exactly that. This allows you to easily modify content without needing technical knowledge to understand the page design.

Our Content Management System was initially developed in 1995 specifically for wineries and has been continually expanded and enhanced. It provides easy-to-use pages to enter and maintain your website content, with anytime access. The content is maintained by topic or area, and is dynamically populated to the appropriate web page(s). For example, adding a new wine is performed on the "Wine Update" page, and that new wine is then reflected on the wine list page, the wine and vintage pages, the order form and shopping cart pages, and in the navigation menu.

Actually, this component could more accurately be called an "Information Management System", as it is so much more than the content management systems provided by other website services vendors. However, since many people understand the basic functions of a content management system, we added the word "Advanced" to our label.

The following lists the categories in our Content Management System. For content that does not fit within one of the categories of the content management system, the winery can create custom pages that retain the same look & feel and can be integrated into the navigation menus.

• Winery
• Vineyards
• Winemaking
• History
• Wines & Vintages (past, current, future)
• Awards & Ratings
• Wine Clubs
• Mailing List Sign-up
• Photo Gallery
• Visit Us, Driving Directions
• News Items
• Upcoming Events & Reservations
• Tour Reservations
• Gift Certificates
• Retailers / Restaurants
• Food Pairings / Recipes
• Brands
• Newsletters
• Merchandise Items
• Shipping Policy/Procedures
• Privacy Policy
• User Reviews
• Winery Blog
• Trade & Media / Document Center
  • Press Releases
  • POS / Marketing Materials
  • Images & Artwork
  • Company/Executive Background
  • Presentations & White Paper
• Links to Other Websites
• Shipping Destinations & Rates
• Ordering & Hosting Parameters
• Navigation Menu Options
• Reporting and Analysis
• Custom pages for other content areas

In addition to all the content pages available within our Content Management System, you also have the ability to create and display additional pages, including:

• A Site Search form for visitors to search for a specific word or phrase on your site
• A Sitemap of all your pages
• A Contact Us form for visitors to email your winery, but which hides your email address from spammers
• An Email a Friend form that allows a visitor to send a branded email about your site to a friend.

The WineWeb's Website service allows a winery to create a customized web presence.

Look & Feel (Design)

• A WineWeb-hosted website is not a "template" website. A template is a static html page that incorporates a specific design. The template pages are then duplicated and content is entered in each. Ongoing maintenance is to the html pages. The WineWeb is based on a custom-developed Advanced Content Management System with a stylesheet that controls the look & feel. Content is entered and maintained in a database. When a visitor requests a specific web page, appropriate data is retrieved from the database and displayed according to the stylesheet parameters. Ongoing maintenance is at the "content" level, not the "web page" level, which allows non-technical persons to update the information, and allows for the information to become data that can be used throughout the website, as opposed to textual, static content.
• A cascading stylesheet (CSS) is created to control the look & feel of each of these generated pages. The stylesheet applies the colors, fonts, graphics and positioning of each design element on a page. This design can optionally be overridden on a page and element level (for example, if a page heading is normally red and centered, on the Vineyard page it can be blue and left-aligned). While the majority of stylesheets in use today control the color and font styles of page elements, the addition of graphics and positioning of all page elements leverages stylesheets to their full potential.
• A separate and custom html page can be defined as the winery's home page, for those wineries that want a "pseudo-splash" page. It can have its own stylesheet, and it can also contain animation, audio and anything else imagined. The home page can display dynamic content, such as upcoming events of news items from the database.
• Flash animation, audio and video can be incorporated into the design. The main restriction with the use of Flash is that it can't be used to control the page navigation, which is a bad idea anyway, since search engines can't read those pages.
• Part of our setup service includes porting over the design elements of your existing website. For a site redesign or a new website, we can work with your designer or we can use one of our designers.

Navigation Menus

• The stylesheet controls the placement and design of the navigation menus. If a winery wants something like dancing wine bottles on a menu mouse-over, it is doable. There are two menu areas available, typically for a top area and a side area.
• We provide two types of navigation menus: dynamic and custom.
  • The dynamic menu options in the side menu area are populated by the content that is entered in the Content Management System. For example, entering information about winemaking creates a "Winemaking" menu option. The order and titles of these menu options have been optimized for visitor effectiveness and search engine rankings, but the order and labels can't be changed. The advantage to dynamic menus is that there is less maintenance as the menus expand based on the content areas.
  • Custom menus allow full control over the labels, order and hierarchy of the navigation menu options. They are relatively easy to modify, but new content areas must be added to the custom menus before they can be seen by your visitors.

The WineWeb provides functionality within its Website service packages to allow your winery to setup and sell their wine clubs. This includes defining one or more wine club offerings on your website. These functions can also be added to e-commerce only or POS-only services.

Visitors to your website can subscribe to your wine club(s) through an online form. We'll notify you of new club member registrations and store the member's information in our system. You can then maintain the club member information in our database and produce reports of your membership. When a club member places an online order, they can login so the shopping cart recognizes them, and gives them the appropriate club discount and pre-fills their name and address information.

This is a full-featured wine club membership management system, allowing you control of your clubs and your members. In addition, the members can login through your website to update their information, further freeing your staff time.

Wine Club Registration & Member Management Features

• The club can be defined as red wine only, white only, a combination, or the customer can select the wine color to ship.
• Shipping cost can be included in the club price, or you can specify shipping costs by destination.
• We will apply sales tax based on your e-commerce settings.
• The club price can be variable based on the wines in each shipment.
• Prepaid pricing can be specified for 3, 6 and 12 month subscriptions.
• The delivery frequency and number of bottles can be specified in addition to images and detailed description of the wine club.
• The wine club registration and member login forms are hosted on our secure server so sensitive data is encrypted for transmission and storage.
• You can setup a club shipment to allow the members to login and change the quantity of wines to receive.
• When a new member registers for one of your clubs, they receive an email with instructions on accessing the online wine club member area of your website.
• Members can login and update their shipping and billing information, and can renew prepaid memberships.
  

Wine Club Shipment Processing
(Add-on Component)

Our Wine Club Shipment Processing service is an add-on component that allows you to process wine club payments and shipments in a batch cycle.

Payment and Shipment Processing

• You begin the shipment process for a wine club by specifying a planned shipment date, and specifying the wines to be included in the shipment, including wines for red-only or white-only customers.
• You can run a pre-processing check for expired prepaid memberships, expired credit cards, and credit card authorization failures. The wine club members can receive an automatic email informing them of the issue(s).
• You can run a process to charge each member's credit card for their shipment. This uses your e-commerce credit card processor and the funds are deposited into your merchant account.
• Exceptions from the credit card processing are identified on the payment processing results page, and you can link to the member's record, fix the issue, and process that payment individually or in a batch of exception payments.
• Carrier shipping labels can be generated in a batch and the resulting data file can be printed on 2-up sheet-fed label paper, sent to a thermal printer, or emailed to a shipping company.
• Packing lists can be generated in a batch for all orders, just winery-pickup orders or just shipment orders. The file can be printed or emailed to a shipping company for inclusion in each box. You can also enter a note to be printed on each packing list.
• Understanding that there will likely be member payment exceptions that will ship after the bulk of the orders, you can process the exceptions individually, or batch them by day.

Integration with Other Systems

• If you already have a system in place to batch process credit card payments and/or shipping labels, you can export a data file in the specific format needed. This format can be saved and reused next time.
• Wine club payment transactions are automatically fed into your consolidated customer repository, so you can track customer history and ensure compliance with future orders.
• Wine club payment transactions are part of our QuickBooks integration.
• If your winery requires advanced wine club management features, over and above those described here, we have integrated our e-commerce service with the Active Club Management wine club solution. We allow Active Club wine club members to order wines in our e-commerce service, with their customer data pre-populating our shopping cart pages and the wine club member discount automatically being applied. You can also export member online order data into the Active Club system.

Our enhanced website service includes the ability to post messages to you own blog.

• Post blog messages as often as desired.
• Allow replies from others to your messages.
• You can edit your posts and the replies to them.
• You can create blog categories and links to other sites.
• You can define the pods that appear at the side of your blog pages.
• You can include images and audio and video podcasts in your blog posts.

Your blog is hosted under your domain name and it reflects the unique style of your website.

Your winery's customers interact with you through a number of mediums including face-to-face, phone, mail, and online. During the life of a customer, they may use multiple methods of purchasing your wines, whether it is in your tasting room, through your wine club, or over the Internet. You need to be able to understand who your best customers are, so you can market effectively to them. You also need to ensure that customer shipments are in compliance with the customer's state regulations.

Imagine one place where all this data exists and imagine a set of tools to use in analyzing your customers and ensuring compliance.

The WineWeb provides a consolidated customer repository that can be used for customer relationship management and compliance verification. In addition to providing a consolidated view of your online, club and POS customers, you can import customer transactions from other winery systems (point-of-sale, wine club processing systems) to fully consolidate customer history from your tasting room, phone/mail orders, wine club and online sales.

Consolidated Customer Repository

• Your winery's consolidated customer repository is a separate data entity from our transactional systems. Throughout each day, we feed data to it for new online orders and new wine club shipments. (The wine club data feed is available if you subscribe to our Wine Club Membership Management add-on component.)
• We allow you to import additional customer history data into our customer repository for other sources of orders (phone, tasting room, etc.). You can then see a consolidated view of your customers, for compliance checking and for customer relationship management.
• We provide online tools that allow you to view, edit and report on your customers.
• Your customer data is safeguarded from unauthorized access by others. WineWeb never uses this data for any purpose other than high-level statistical reporting.
• We use a matching algorithm based on a combination of name and address data to identify a customer, even if their information is not identical from order to order.
• We provide a tool to merge data from two customer records that are found to be the same customer.
• We compute the Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) for each customer and allow you to sort and select on this value to identify your best customers.

The following advanced features are available for wineries subscribing to the WineWeb's Enhanced Website or Premier Bundle service.

• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) component. Details
• Automatic population of RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) metrics from the customer sales history.
• Automatic population of customer levels to segregate your customers for discounting and promotions.
• Additional reporting and selection capabilities.
  

Our Reporting Module allows your winery to create custom, professional-looking reports on Orders, Customers, Wine Club Members and Wine Club Sales. You can display and print the reports in PDF or HTML format. Numerous sort and selection options are available for all reports.

The following report types are available:

• Order Summary
• Order Detail
• Sales Tax
• POS End-of-Day
• Wine Club Member
• Wine Club Sales
• Customer
• Inventory Status
• Inventory Transactions
• Executive Statistics

If the reporting does not satisfy a specific need, all data can be exported in a custom-specified format, suitable for use in a spreadsheet.

Email Campaign Management (Add-on Component)

Our Email Campaign Management service is an add-on component to our enhanced or small winery website hosting plans. The Email Campaign Management component allows you to manage your mailing list, create professional-looking emails, broadcast the messages to a subset or your entire mailing list, and manage the bounced emails.

There are multiple plans available:

1. A free version included in the Enhanced Website Hosting Plan that allows you to send up to 2,000 broadcast emails, with a single subscription list.
2. A $15/month version that allows you to send an extra 2,000 broadcast emails, with two subscription lists.
3. A $30/month version that allows you to send an extra 5,000 broadcast emails, with multiple subscription lists.
4. A $50/month version that allows you to send an extra 10,000 broadcast emails, with multiple subscription lists.
5. A $75/month version that allows you to send an extra 20,000 broadcast emails, with multiple subscription lists.
6. A $100/month version that allows you to send an extra 30,000 broadcast emails, with multiple subscription lists.

• Send up to 32,000 broadcast emails a month (need more? contact us for pricing)
  • Email accounts are Sender Policy Framework (SPF) enabled, which results in more emails getting through to your customers
  • You can send to subsets of your subscription lists for very targeted messages
• Capture visitor email addresses on your home page.
  • Select additional demographic information to capture from visitors
  • Allow the visitor to subscribe to one or more email subscription lists
  • Single or double opt-in option for each email subscription list
• Easily create HTML email campaigns including graphics and colors
  • Format your message using a word processor type interface
  • Create both HTML and text messages for each campaign
  • Send a test email to yourself before broadcasting to your list
• Send emails to an entire subscription list or define a subset of the list
• Easily manage email campaigns
  • Automatically process bounced emails - no wading through bounced messages in your inbox
  • Setup filters to ignore out-of-office and vacation bounces
  • Separate hard bounces (unknown user) from soft bounces (over mailbox quota) and apply difference deletion rules to each
  • Track click-through statistics to the individual recipient level

Our company policy, and our hosting company's policy, is to only allow broadcast emails to opt-in subscription lists. Any use of this tool for sending spam email is cause for termination of your services.

Mobile Website App (Add-on Component)

WineWeb's iPhone web app component allows its hosted winery websites to display like a native application on these mobile devices. This mobile component integrates with WineWeb's content management and e-commerce services, so mobile users can interact online with the winery, including buying wine online, registering for wine clubs, purchasing event tickets, and using the newly-released social media tools. This mobile component extends a winery website to be optimized for the iPhone and similar mobile devices. Over 50 programs were developed to support the uniqueness of the mobile environment and workflow.

The mobile winery website component leverages all the content available in the WineWeb system, so wineries can maintain a single set of data. Wineries can include a customized navigation menu structure and design theme to their mobile winery website to further promote their wine brand. This component is available as a no cost enhancement to wineries using WineWeb's Premier Bundle or as a $20 per month add-on to the Enhanced Website service.

If you'd like to look at our Test Vineyards mobile website, point your iPhone (or Palm Pre) to m.testvineyards.com. You can also get an idea of the interface by shrinking the Safari browser to it's minimum width and browsing the site. (Safari is also available for Windows PCs at apple.com).

We can transfer your existing domain name (www.yourwinery.com) or can help you to register a new domain name for your winery. You are responsible for your domain name ownership and registration fees, as that should be treated as an asset of your business. We request that we are named as the Technical Contact for the domain name, and you retain the Administrative and Billing Contacts. We can work with any domain name registrar that you choose.

During our setup process, we provide you with a temporary domain name where you can review your new website. When you are happy with the setup, we point your domain name to our servers and your site is then live under your domain name.

Email Accounts

We setup email accounts under your domain name (yourname@yourwinery.com). You then have full access to administer your email accounts and your email settings.

• Enhanced website plan: unlimited email accounts with 8 gigabytes total space
• Small Winery website plan: 8 email accounts with 2 gigabytes total space

We use the SmarterMail email software from SmarterTools. This email software has advanced spam protection based on spam blacklists, Bayesian Filtering, Greylisting, Reverse DNS and Sender Policy Framework (SPF). The package also includes advanced content filtering and auto-clean folder settings at the domain and individual user level. You can modify the spam settings for your domain as needed.

Your messages can be retrieved from anywhere by logging into the website (webmail) or your messages can be downloaded and accessed through a mail program such as MS Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird, etc.

We track the visits to each of the pages on your website and let you view this data. Our summary level statistics page shows the number of visits to each of your pages over a user-selectable time period. The detail pages show a record of each visit with timestamp and IP address.

The enhanced hosting package also includes access to the SmarterStats traffic statistics package from SmarterTools. This full-featured website statistics package includes over 130 pre-defined reports and the ability to create customized reports. Everything from page views, entry paths, search engine phrases, and referring sites can be viewed and analyzed.

For wineries that want to track the effectiveness of Google AdWords campaigns, we also integrate with the Google Analytics tool.

Our enhanced hosting plan also includes additional space on our server. This allows you to add other applications to your site. The enhanced hosting account includes:

• 500MB disk space
• 7GB monthly bandwidth usage
• 1 FTP account with unlimited usage
• MS SQ Server, MySQL or MS Access database with up to 50MB space
• Support for ColdFusion MX, ASP.NET, PHP, Java applets, Flash remoting

Our systems are housed in a professionally-managed data center with redundancy and fail-over for data, telecommunications, processors, power and environmental controls. Your data is protected and sensitive data is encrypted during transmission and storage.

• Web server data is mirrored (copied immediately) to a second disk drive for redundancy
• This data is also copied to a fail-over server. This server automatically handles website traffic in case of a failure of the primary server. All clients using our Enhanced Website or Premier Bundle services, as well as all traffic for our e-commerce and POS services are automatically routed to the secondary server, providing our clients with close to 100% uptime.
• Database data is stored on a separate server with redundant drives and is backed up nightly, as well as periodic offsite backups.
• Data center specifics:
  • The data center is located well away from any known earthquake fault lines near Dallas, TX
  • Over 38,000 sq ft of raised floor
  • Sits atop multiple power grids driven by TXU electric
  • Multiple Liebert and PowerWare UPS battery backup power, and onsite permanent generator power
  • HVAC systems are a combination of glycol, chilled water, and condenser units by Liebert and Data Aire
  • Communications network is fully meshed and redundant with 6 backbone providers
  • Fire suppression includes a pre-action dry pipe system in both facilities including VESDA (very early smoke detection apparatus) along with over 600 smoke detectors.
  • Physical security is via key card access with CCTV.

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