I've been reading a lot lately about how important it is for businesses to be mobile-friendly. The theory seems to be that everyone is out-and-about and using their iPhone or Blackberry to get their information.
Since I do web design, I decided to set up our website (http://www.charnuwinery.com) to work on an iPhone. I'm hoping that this also makes it work well on a Blackberry (which I can't test). If you have one of these, check it out and let me know what you think.
But the skeptic in me wonders how useful this really is for wineries. I can see it for some businesses, say restaurants. You're with some friends and on the spur of the moment decide you want to get something to eat. You use your mobile device to find a restaurant that sounds interesting, and then to get their phone number and call them.
Where this breaks down for wineries is that wineries are actually rather rare . They tend to be concentrated in places like Napa Valley. People have to make an effort to get to them, so usually already have some idea of which ones they're going to visit.
They probably used the web to find those wineries, but I'm guessing they used a PC/Mac to do it, and not their mobile device.
But maybe I'm missing something. Can you see yourself needing to visit a winery's website on your mobile device? If so, what's the scenario.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks for an interesting post. I've been subscribed for a while, and you're on my list of winery blogs.
I have an iPhone, and last year went tasting in Sonoma County with visiting friends. We were just casually driving around, so I used my iPhone to locate wineries as we went. A Flash-based Web site is unusable, of course. The question, on an iPhone at least, is whether you type "Charnu Winery" into Google, or whether you open up Google Maps and search for "winery" (which does a local search).
The answer, of course, is to measure traffic to your mobile-enabled page, and decide what do to based on that.
How (besides this post) will you promote your mobile-enabled pages to your customers, visitors, etc.?
Thanks for the comment Mike. In truth, I haven't decided yet to promote the mobile-enabled pages. I figured that the first step was simply to accommodate those visiting via iPhone.
We're at a bit of a disadvantage in that we don't have a tasting room, so we have to make other arrangements when someone wants to do a tasting. As a result, it doesn't really work well to have people visit on the spur of the moment.