Moombaki Wines, a Denmark wineryin Australia’s South West region, have recently gone live with a new website on our platform.

The Moombaki winery is located in one of the most beautiful areas in the world (in my humble opinion). They also produce some of the finest wine in the country, with their Moombaki Reserve being rated a 95/100 by James Halliday and landing a coveted place in the Wine Companion’s Best of the Best 2009 in the Cabernet category.

The new website was designed by graphic designer Tracy Graffin. The design is elegantly simple (and if you’ve been involved in web design you’ll know that delivering to this standard is anything but simple).

A winery website has several important objectives:

• contribute to building the brand
• help find new visitors searching for regional and varietal wines
• allow visitors to buy wine (whether that be via the telephone, mail or online)

The Moombaki brand is beautifully presented and makes use of strong images - for example, each variety of wine has its own signature image which is presented on the wine label. To allow Tracy to implement the new design for Moombaki’s website, we introduced a new custom header feature allowing a custom header image to be assigned to specific pages, and also the ability to present custom images in the sidebar for certain pages. These features are now available to all OM4 websites.

The Moombaki site makes use of our new integrated shopping cart. Many of the major eCommerce facilities are aimed at online retailers with hundreds/thousands of products. This can lead to an experience dominated by search and short product descriptions. In contrast, many of our clients have a small number of products that they want to present in more detail.

If you look at the way wines are presented on the Moombaki site, you will first of all see the wine and be presented with information, reviews and awards. Simple Add to Cart buttons can be placed anywhere in the page (or in a blog post), which means it is possible to present the buying opportunity after the wine itself has been presented. Once the Add to Cart option is used, a small checkout appears in the sidebar, and stays with the visitor until they decide to check out. If you try the Moombaki shopping cart you will also notice the new Assurance Centre facility, introduced to help assure potential buyers that issues such as security, privacy and delivery have been considered and addressed.

Using the integrated shopping cart means the website retains a simple and elegant design for first time visitors without creating an impression that the website is primarily about selling. Naturally if the visitor expresses an interest in buying, then it is easy to do just that.

Consider the experience you have when you visit a cellar door - the first thing you are presented with is the wines. It is usually the case that only after the wine has been experienced that you are presented (discreetly) with an opportunity to buy the wines.

Selling a product or service online very much about engaging attention, building interest, generating desire and facilitating action. But taking away the barriers to action is of critical importance. Indeed where buying online is involved you should focus on this before anything else. I really like the way the Moombaki site has come together in this respect - the website clearly presents the wines, and when visitors are ready to buy, it is easy to select and purchase the wine. I’ll be keeping a close interest in how the website performs in terms of online sales.

Melissa Boughey and David Britten are not only good with grapes and wines, they are good with words. So it is going to be particularly interesting to watch what happens when the wonderful content they produce is presented to the world in a manner that is also search engine friendly.