This site is technically not quite complete yet, but it has been live for a while now so it’s worth adding to the portfolio.
Queens Pinch is the Andrew Buchanan family vineyard located in the renowned Mudgee wine district of New South Wales, Australia.
Andrew is both an old friend and a long time client through his communications consulting business AB Communicates. Long term listeners – and broadcasters – of ABC Radio will know his name and his voice.
The brief was for a website to promote the current and future vintages produced by the Queens Pinch vineyard, with a facility to order and purchase the wines online.
With a relatively small number of pages that would feature some compelling copy and beautiful photographs, a simple site structure emerged and that informed much of the rest of the design.
Aesthetically, it was as much an exercise in leaving well enough alone as anything else. We felt an understated elegance in look and feel would properly put the focus on the quality of the wines, on which we were lucky enough to conduct some errr … user testing.
Hazel crafted some wonderful copy, which makes the site a pleasure to read as well as look at. We had a good range of excellent photographs to choose from, so it was mostly a case of arranging things on the web page.
We really aimed to make a site that would offer a warm welcome, draw the visitor in and provide them with the opportunity to order the wine, without any kind of pressure or “maximum sales impact” feel.
Since there are no plans to post regular news or events content to the website it has been designed as a static HTML site, but with all the presentational coding in the style sheet, a clear page structure based on segments such as headers, footers and sidebars, and a site-persistent navigation menu, it would be easy to turn this into a dynamic PHP-based site, for instance.
If you’re wondering in which sense the site is “technically not quite complete”, it is that the online transaction system to be provided by a financial institution has not yet been, well … provided.
Perhaps, in keeping with the understated tone of the website itself, the less said about that, the better.