JohnTylerWines.com–a social makeover
Posted on | May 5, 2010 | No Comments
***Please note: The new site has since changed hosting and direction. I have lost the original content strategy, structure, and social interactivity.***
I’ve been working with Katey and Nicole Bacigalupi over at JohnTylerWines.com with their website and online presence. In August 2008, they asked me to help them learn more about getting online– specifically–to help them start a blog.
I had a look at their original site. Click the image. Have a look around. It was their web 1.0 incarnation.
I asked them a couple questions:
- Why do you want to start a blog?
- What are your current online skills?
They answered: “We don’t like our current site. We can’t update it ourselves. Whenever we want to update it, we have to wait for turnaround time from our web guy. More often than not, we have to correct what we originally asked him to do. Our updates are lost in translation. Also, website is too stiff and inaccessible. It’s not us. We just want a place where we can start our conversation. We thought we’d start with a blog.”
I’d been asked many times over to help somebody start a blog. Mainly though, people don’t realize how much work it is. I looked at their site again and thought it did need some life. It was a brochure. It was static. Nothing exciting was happening on it. They weren’t selling any wine from it. It just existed.
Regardless, to make sure the girls were serious about their ambitions, I asked them to start a blog at WordPress.com. I orientated them on how to create a post, add a picture, and publish. Literally, it’s 1.2.3. I recommended that they start using WordPress.com for a number of reasons:
- WordPress.com is a place to start an interactive online presence. It’s a powerful platform full of millions of users. You have an immediate audience.
- They would get used to using WordPress as a CMS and get comfortable creating and adding their own content.
- After a few months of getting started, they would have a really good idea of what they wanted to say.
- All of their efforts were exportable and importable to a custom, self-hosted website.
- WordPress is inherently cross-platform, cross-browser compatible. Meaning, you can look at a website with Internet Explorer or FireFox on a PC or Safari on a Mac. Also, for those of you concerned about mobile, WordPress works intrinsically on most mobile platforms.
Over the next few months, we also set them up in Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook and fed their updates from one site to the other. They started to listen and participate and interact. In general, they just got comfortable with getting their voices and message online.
After a few months and weekly coaching sessions, I knew that they were serious about updating and maintaining their own content. Once they had a good start on what they wanted to say, we translated that to the new website and went from there. Finally, they were getting to tell their story in their own words. They were also gaining the skills to create, update, and maintain their online presence.
By January 2009, we started redesigning their web 1.0 website. We launched it in April 2009.
Katey and Nicole created ALL of the content on their site–including the pictures. They manage their social accounts and web presence. The current stats for the past year are:
- Website/blog: 115 posts, 51 comments, 7371 unique visits, 22 703 page views
- Facebook: 1786 friends, 818 fans
- Twitter: 510 tweets, 729 followers
- Flickr: 17 contacts
- New wine club members: ???
- Wine sold: ????
We have a list of things we’d like to do both with the site and with social media. Right now, I am pleased these two girls have accomplished so much. Next time, I’ll look at the ROI on our efforts and publish some lessons learned from the experience.
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