Case Studies

Brown Magpie Wines Brown Magpie Wines is a boutique winery at Modewarre in Victoria's surf coast hinterland.  It specialises in cool climate wines. Features   In this website, the images and the overall graphic design help to create a personal and individualistic feeling for this company and to convey the uniqueness of its products.  Colours are important in reinforcing the brand identity, as well as in creating a sense of warmth and friendliness.

The text on the site is concise, but it was important to develop the content sufficiently to convey the individuality and personality of the company and its wines.  The bold navigation makes it easy to find information.

The home page features an image gallery designed to capture the essence of this picturesque vineyard, its ambience and philosophy.

A product catalogue is used to organise and publish details of the individual wines.

An 'Awards and Trophies' section that is part of the 'Our Story' section helps visitors who are not already familiar with the wines to appreciate their quality.

Online Sales

Sometime after the development project had commenced, it was decided to give site visitors the option to purchase wines directly through the website.  Fortunately the Hypersite technology on which the site was built, includes ecommerce capability that can be activated readily.

Because the company does not have a very large range of products, it was decided to configure the shopping cart so it would look very similar to the cellar door Order Form that the company uses.  Integration with Pay Pal for purchasing kept costs low while giving customers a secure, professional purchasing experience.

Marketing the site

The Brown Magpie Wines website replaced a site that had operated for several years, so there was some traffic already available.  It was decided to include a blog on the site, which was named 'The Warble' in honor of the rare brown magpies that make their home at the vineyard.

The winemaker makes regular blog posts about the life of the vineyard and winery.  The posts rank very highly in Google searches.  We intend to develop a more deliberate strategy to better harness the power of the blog to drive traffic to the website in the months ahead.

A further stage may be to optimise pages for natural search to build traffic to the website long-term.

Please visit the Brown Magpie Wines website.