websites: http://winespectator.com, http://corkd.com
As I began to draft this article out, an amazing announcement came that Gary Vaynerchuk, famous wine vlogger at Wine Library TV, acquired Cork’d, a web 2.0 community site for reviewing wine. This could mean great things for a continually growing online community of the knowledge hungry wine youths. Since 2005, wine has overtaken beer as America’s drink of choice, and the marketers have targeted in on the Millenials and with good reason. The wine market has an intimidating learning curve to a beginner, and simple things like unique packaging, flashy labels, or quirky names, can set a wine out amongst the sea of indecipherable foreign labels with chateaus and medieval fonts. Millenials are drinkers not collectors, drinkers that can easily become brand enthusiasts, loving to share the knowledge they have with peers, which is why Cork’d exploded ever since its launch last year.
So with a web-savvy, info hungry audience looking for a helpful guide into this sometimes gated community of wine appreciation, it would make sense that Wine Spectator Online would be a safe haven, perhaps not on the cutting edge of social web technology, but at least a highly useful online Encyclopedia Brittanica of all things wine. Oh… but no, so far from it, so very far from it. I cannot fathom how the slick oversized glossy pages (makes the in some ways more friendly, approachable Food & Wine pathetic in comparison) could be translated so poorly into this uninspired chaotic design:
I could go own for pages about what drives me nuts about Wine Spectator Online. The biggest crime to its name is that it actually has a wealth of content, useful industry respected content. It’s just so unnecessarily hard to find. In the sea of dull grey and blue that is the boring WS homepage, it took me nearly a full year’s paid subscription to even realize there was blogs, forums, travel information, etc. Wine Spectator the print version is packed full of content already, to aimlessly pile more content creates a disorienting browsing experience. There are no individual RSS feeds for the blogs, or an easy way to distinguish one from the other, or from the exclusive WS online articles for that matter. Wine Videos… is this like a wine vlog or educational videos, I’m not sure and WS isn’t helping. They direct me to view from various different channels with no definitions of what is what, no helpful tags to cross channels, and its certainly not exporting any sort of XML making the video content searchable. Everything just seems to be throw in haphazardly and without proper thought. Ask Dr. Vinny, a wine expert column that isn’t integrated into the overall site search, no RSS, no categorization. It’s the everything but the kitchen sink policy to web design.
Well at least they got their primary site use functionality nailed, right? At least searching for wine reviews is easy. While a recent update has taken it from “disastrous” to “lacking”, the inability to customize the display of the returned list, especially when it is supposed to act as a shopping guide, is a major problem that makes me really wonder how far into the experience the creators of the site thought. It seems that all the paths get you as far as information retrieval without allowing the user to actual use the information they are being inundated with (and there certainly is a flood of it). Part II… where the world of online wine needs to go to get me truly excited.
technorati tags: Wine Spectator, Cork’d, wine
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