My LIWF highlight was not a wine...

The recent LIWF (London International Wine Fair Excel centre 22-24 May 2012) was a rather different affair to the RAW fair or the Real Wine Fair held around the same time in central London.

Both of the latter were civilised affairs - RAW taking the biscuit thanks to its venue and the talks and presentations in my view - compared to the LIWF, where a sea of mostly very mass-market wines overwhelmed the palate.

My highlight of the LIWF was a presentation by Ryan Opaz at the Access Zone entitled 'Winery Websites - the good, the bad and the ugly'.

The stark reality, according to Ryan, is that most of them 'suck'. They are unimaginative, plagued by designs using copious Flash effects, and just fail to communicate - which is what they are supposed to do.

He went on to outline a few rules to ensure that your site does the minimum required of it. They are (briefly):

Own your brand - otherwise others will do it of you.

Make it mobile - most people look at websites on mobile technology now and if your page takes an age to load or is otherwise non mobile device friendly people will go elsewhere. Flash is not your friend.

Who are you and how can we get hold of you ? Too often sites will not even have an email address let alone a contact us button.

Be comfortable with Facebook and Twitter. Show your face.

Who are you ? Make it personal.

Talk about your passions. Give us some context.

Google likes content, key points and differentiators.

Use simple url's

Less is more.

What I liked about Ryan's intervention was its clarity and lack of buzzword terminology. I think that not only winemakers could benefit from putting these simple rules into practice. Oh yes, and a website is never ending - make sure your content is up to date and changes regularly. Nothing worse than a blog or a site last updated a decade ago...

vrazon (Ryan's company) website: www.vrazon.com