Well since it’s miserable outside I have more time for work. With all this time I have started approaching our own projects, are our and our clients sites loading correctly? Believe it or not, some times what is working perfectly today, stops working down the road, and without any apparent reason. But there are reasons, sometimes the big internet host will update their servers, they will change the software parameters, they will just mess you up.

So, take some time and go through your site, page by page, try your forms and make sure they still work, fix those grammar and spelling errors that you found last year but didn’t have time to correct. I am the worst speller so I rely on the spell check, that doesn’t fix then vs than.

If you are a CMS based site (WordPress, Joomla or Drupal) then check for updates. But before you run the updates do a backup of the site. Yes those updates can really mess thing up if your not careful. Update the plugins as well.

Take some time and get ready for when spring really gets here, because we hope you will be t0o busy in the tasting room to mess with your web site.

If for some reason you are in a locality that requires this, then wouldn’t a simple statement on your front / first page saying the visitor needs to be 21 be sufficiant?

The reason we object to this simple questionnaire is that many search engines will stop right there. they will not continue to index your site and add your data to their databases.  This means you will not get traffic from these search engines when your customers ask for anything other then the winery name.  If your customer knows that they want ABC wines and inputs ABC wine you will show up, but if they input ‘wine tasting in Jackson county, ABC Winery will not show.

This argument is also true of many splash screen and flash presentations before you enter a site.

Designing a fresh look is difficult, what will look good and be readable. Not all combinations work so we are trying to find the colors that compliment and the text styles and sizes that are readable. We have looked at just about every winery web site that is in Oregon and Washington, and there is some really great work out there. And then again!

One of the most common errors we see is where the color of the background and the color of the text is to close. There isn’t enough contrast to make the page easy to read. Or maybe there is to much contrast, a black background with white text. That’s close to what we have here, but we chose to use a dark grey and BOLD our text. You may not like it, but you can read it.

In between projects we have time to polish our options and come up with new ideas and new looks, so we have decided to add to our site ’80 percent winery web sites’. Who knows, you might see something that is just what you want or is a great starting place for your new look. These are not used as mass templates, but one off uses. If it’s what you want, we won’t sell the same one twice.

What’s the benefit to you? A complete, well thought out online store or brochure for you with minimal wait. And most of the debugging already done.

Take a look at what we have currently available, and check back often to see what’s new. It’s also a place where we can try new projects like our new 24/7 booking system.

Internet Solutions by Red Hills Media

Your customers may thing that the story is dated, but at least it won’t show it’s been 2 years. A lack of news on a blog gives the impression that you don’t care, that nothing is actually new. So if your not going to keep one updated, do yourselves a favor and skip it. Same for Facebook pages. Use them = good, don’t use them=bad.