The internet has long been associated with the idea of freedom. Freedom of information; freedom to browse; freedom to shop; freedom to buy. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, and total-immersion RPGs like Second Life, it also resembles more and more the cyber-reality worlds of William Gibson and Orson Scott Card, who imagined future utopias where everyone lived in online space. What has all this got to do with wine merchants? Wine merchants, like everyone else, are trading in an increasingly virtual reality, where the traditional storefront †the experience of shopping in a real building †is replaced by bits, bytes and virtual shopping carts. And wine merchants (unlike, say, people who sell CDs) have relied on the sights and smells of their shops to sell their products for centuries. Let’s face it. Buying wine, when removed from the comforting aroma of a wine merchants’ (the wooden barrels, the polished floor), lacks something. Not to mention, of course, one’s favourite wine merchants’ torrent of helpful advice †â€I picked this one out for youâ€; â€have you tried the Semillon?â€. Shopping with online wine merchants removes vital sensory input from the potential buyer. Unless, of course, wine merchants can somehow recreate the ambience of a real store on the virtual high street. No-one knows what Amazon â€feels†like, or the online version of HMV †amorphous masses, confusing, unfocused †like a kind of virtual TK Maxx, where everything is piled more or less at will. But virtual wine merchants? With the right site design, the right features and feel, online wine merchants could feel as welcoming and personal as a real building on a real street. The website is the storefront of the virtual shop. When designing it to parallel the experience of shopping with real wine merchants, a programmer is faced with two problems: how to translate essentially fleeting sense perceptions like the sounds, sights and smells of a three dimensional shop into a 2D website; and how to make a bunch of data displayed on a screen â€feel†friendly. Good online wine merchants are already displaying sites that manage in some small way to recapture the feel of a real wine shop. They opt for simple, full-bodied colours (an unostentatious green, or a winey red), clear product departments and old-fashioned logos. The wine merchants business is so tied up in the public perception with aspirations of sophistication that a modern logo, unless it’s somehow humorous like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon, creates entirely the wrong impression. Old-style logos make their sites â€feel†quaint and welcoming. Wine merchants looking to gain trusted presence on the net might do well to follow this line of reasoning. Setting up a friendly, family-run storefront on the virtual high street could be the best piece of real-estate they ever bought.
Please Rate this Article 5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
