An interactive winery tour website of a rare vintage
The Background
The San Francisco Chronicle has provided decades-long, trusted coverage of the California wine industry. This long-standing reputation for expertise led The Chronicle to take the necessary steps to develop what they hoped to be THE one-stop travel resource for anyone wishing to get the most out of a visit to the state’s fantastic wine regions.
The cleverly named website, The Press, would need to be mobile-friendly and easy-to-use from home or on the road. It should provide a comprehensive collection of winery reviews, maps and recommendations to tourists and locals alike to maximize the quality of their California Wine Country experience.
The Opportunity
The website needed to deliver an enhanced visual experience, allowing users to easily research, customize, and map out their tour.
As the most current information on wineries, their wines, and regional restaurants and accommodations can change frequently, the site needed to be designed in such a manner as to make copy changes and general maintenance a breeze for its administrators.
The key differentiator and competitive advantage for The Press over other websites and search engines would be the strength and expertise of The Chronicles’ content creators – its roster of trusted and respected California wine country, food, wine, and travel writers.
Services Provided
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- Prototyping
- Wordpress/Custom Theme Development
- Database Syncing Systems Development
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The Solution
With a clear understanding of The Chronicle’s needs and advantages, Relish’s Development Team began assessing all options for delivering the most pleasing user experience for the site’s administrators and California wine country enthusiasts alike.
To ensure that users viewed The Press website as a one-stop information hub for planning a California wine country trip, the Relish team converted The Press’s current site into WordPress-based format. This conversion allowed the development and installation of custom plugins to operate within that system, adding new functionality such as creating and logging into user accounts, a dynamic trip planning tool, and a filterable map.
As a result of these improvements, the user could now bring in new search parameters or change the layout within the trip planning and mapping tools to filter by region, sub-region, or a variety of other categories, including wine specialties and cost.
These improvements also provided administrators with new tools to draw shapes on the map and better organize the website to define specific regions.
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