Earle Wines

Earle Wines is one of North Yorkshire’s leading fine wine merchants based in Wormald Green, Harrogate. Earle Wines is a family run business originally founded by John Earle Jacobs back in 1980 and is recognised as an authority on fine wine. Unlike most other fine wine merchants, Earle Wines stock most of their products ensuring wines are delivered quickly without unnecessary delay.

Their online shop allows customers to browse for wines using a variety of methods including by type, vintage, country of origin, vineyard, variety and style. This provides a very helpful and informative way of navigating the site and ordering products which far surpasses those offered by competitors.

Earle Wines Review

We were approached by Earle Wines following unsatisfactory support from their previous developer. The Earle Wines website had recently been constructed using bespoke coding, then abandoned with flaws which were meant to have been fixed before signing off the project. Aside from build quality, the main issue recognised by Earle Wines was its lack to rank anywhere in search results.

We explained to Earle Wines that changes could be made to the existing code which would rectify most of the issues they had highlighted, although these changes would be time consuming and any future improvements would also be relatively more expensive due to its underlying construction. With this in mind, we provided comparable quotations to repair the existing website as well as rebuilding it using a more suitable platform providing better flexibility for future expansion and functionality.

Earle Wines agreed that rebuilding the website using a more suitable scalable database structure was the correct way forward, but after their recent disappointment with their previous developer they were understandably a little apprehensive about starting again from scratch. We agreed to part fund the project because some of the ecommerce coding we were to develop could be reused for future projects. To provide further reassurance we also decided that no payment would need to be made until the project had been completed and Earle Wines could see exactly what they were paying for.

The previous website design utilised a fixed width and height template which provided a challenge in itself for an ecommerce website selling so many products. Earle Wines wanted to retain this feature so most of the changes we made to the design were finishing touches like the 3D background with drop shadow and optimising the layout to fit into a 1024x768 browser window without scroll bars.

The online administration area provides a very straightforward system for maintaining the website and products featured on it. We also created an XML feed that automatically updates to display products within the Shopping section of Google search.

The shopping basket utilises JavaScript based AJAX coding allowing products to be added into the basket without navigating the user away from their current page. This ensures the flow for visitors ordering multiple products from the same page is not disrupted; a user can view the basket instantly on any page by simply clicking the basket link in the header.

jQuery was also used extensively on the website providing tabbed browsing and a slideshow for limited edition prints advertised beneath the left-hand menu.

When the website was launched we noticed a massive improvement in search engine ranking, the Earle Wines website was now appearing on the 1st page of Google for many of their desired keyword terms and was often the first result for many of the specialised wines and champagnes they sold. Another benefit of the website redevelopment was that Earle Wines now ranked very well for vineyard specific searches generating further traffic to the website and subsequently more sales.

Now that the redevelopment work is complete we are working closely with Earle Wines to continually improve search ranking and ensure the website meets the exacting needs of its users.

Screenshot of the Earle Wines website

Earle Wines Contact Details