Noble Estates: Web site
Business need
Noble Estates Wines & Spirits is a beverage agency. They represent wineries and distilleries from around the world, marketing and selling their products to Ontario restaurants, bars and the liquor board (customers), and marketing to end consumers.
Noble responds to many requests from consumers for information on specific products or suppliers, tasting notes, serving advice and related products. Noble hoped to attract new suppliers to their services, yet there was no simple way for these suppliers to learn more about the agency from foreign locations. Noble had no comprehensive brochure profiling their agency and products.
Alantext solution
I created the first Noble Estates web site. I registered a .com domain name for them, and set up e-mail for this domain. This in itself created a more professional appearance to their communications.
I met with the client and analysed current communications to establish what sort of information visiting customers, suppliers and consumers would require. We discussed the sort of look and tone that they would like for their site.
We decided on a clean, modern appearance. I created white pages and just a few strong visual elements for a fresh, uncluttered look. Large, clear product photos provide a bold visual element and enable customers to get a good look at the product in order to later recognize it in a store.
Each of Noble's suppliers has at least one dedicated page that displays and describes the available products. Links are provided to the wineries' and distilleries' own web sites, for visitors who want further information.
As Noble's site contains dozens of pages, persistent navigation was provided so that visitors would always have an obvious route to reach major sections.
Formatting is achieved via Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a more efficient way of defining fonts, colours and layout. CSS enables quicker and easier updates, additions and design changes, thus saving the client money. Sites using CSS also load more quickly. Meta tags with descriptive keywords were created to facilitate potential suppliers locating the agency through search engines.
The weather page adds some live content to encourage repeat visitors. Live data feeds display current weather conditions at each of nine world wine regions, corresponding to products carried by Noble Estates.
The beauty of this execution is that every time a visitor loads the page, the information is new and current. This adds a fun tie-in to the wine subject.
The creation of the web site has begun to drive changes to other elements of Noble Estates' marketing. As I write product web pages I identify errors and inconsistencies in print materials, and I work with Noble staff to improve these.
Noble has gained new supplier clients who researched the agency through the web site. We plan to add more useful resources to the web site, as well as more fun elements.
“Alan’s vision for our web site is really coming true now. New suppliers are finding us and researching us through the site. This thing is making us money!”
Philip Mirabelli, President, Noble Estates Wines & Spirits.
“Bravo. Your site is absolutely superb! Very professionally done. And easy to read, fast, a RARE quality.”
Jean-Marc Roget, Président-Directeur Général de la société Chartreuse-Diffusion.