Many wineries sacrifice usability for the sake of design, while others sacrifice design for the sake of usability. Neither of which are necessary. Design is absolutely essential, especially when dealing with a product that is highly tied to sensory perception. However, As the provider of a valuable service and product, your online goals should evolve around what your customer would want from your site, as well as what you want your site to do. Customers want to access information quickly and easily, without having to jump through excessive hoops. As such, usability is extremely important for many factors of your web portal.

Usability refers to the ease of navigation and interaction of your site, including cross browser consistency. Flash platforms can make navigation difficult, and do not translate for search engines or onto mobile devices. They also impede user accessibility, as the content cannot be enlarged, nor can they activate disability networks. Usability also applies to one of the most important factors of your web portal, mobile browsing.

Although only 17% of adults use smart phones, 40% of all adults browse the web on other mobile devices. Wineries can leverage the convenience of mobile browsing to bring in customers who otherwise might have surpassed your venue. Having a site that can translate onto mobile devices will enable traveling tasters looking for something specific in a winery, like a cafe, outdoor tasting, or certain varietals, to find your winery. As of right now, finding quick information about wineries on your mobile device in virtually impossible. With the steady increase of mobile browsing (6% in the past year compared to 4% the previous year), and the growing demographic of wine drinkers between the ages of 21 to 49, a mobile friendly website can be your number one sales rep. You can also have integrated Google maps to give visitors directions to your winery right on their phones.
The easier you make their wine tasting efforts, the more likely they are to come to your winery.

So how do you do it?
By following usability standards, you can guarantee cross browser compatibility, including mobile browsers. It must be understood how different browsing on a mobile device is from browsing on a computer screen. The size of the screen goes without saying, but other factors must be taken into account. Scrolling, clicking, hovering, all of the process operate differently when using mobile devices. And they work differently between mobile devices, such as using a touch screen phone versus using a button-driven phone. The easiest things to do are choose CSS over Flash design and any necessary Flash animation should have static content to fill the spot on mobile devices.

Bring your winery into the age of mobile web. Traveling tasters will appreciate the ease of accessing directions and other information about your winery, and they will show it.