The site I chose to review is that of a famous California Winery, Robert Mondavi. Their wines are of fairly high quality, so I thought I would check out their site to see how that measured up.

They have a pretty decent site that is nicely organized but needs a little bit more investment. The colors, the arrangements and the layout are all excellent, but there are way too many links that are simply done through the use of text. I would reco mmend hiring an artist to spend one day creating some nice looking text in Photoshop. This would really give the site a much more professional appearance. I can tell that this is a company that hired some good programmers but weren’t willing to pay the price. Hell, this site isn’t even meta tagged!

Their index page is very nicely laid out, but takes a lot of time to load up. I think that their wine list takes up a good chunk of time since each item loads up individually. I’m working with at 28,800 which isn’t that bad and it still takes a good minute to load up. As far as Internet time goes, that’s an eternity. Perhaps saving those files in a lesser quality setting might make them a little smaller and quicker to load up, or maybe they could use an imagemap in order to have the same effect, bu t have the wine list load up with one graphic instead of several.

Another attractive aspect of the site was the earthy colors they chose. I thought it gave the site a very pleasant, calming quality. The main navigation bar was repeated throughout the site, except for their winery and most popular wines, such as Woo bridge wine, which have their own domains and sites. I thought that this was nice, since each had a very different layout and approach. The content on each was also very different. It made surfing through them interesting.

This leaves me with content. The site offered a brief description of the different wines and how each is made. A fun section was the events section, where people pay as much as $750 to participate to a fantastic dinner and wine tasting with some of t he world’s most renowned chefs. The most amazing thing was that it’s sold out! The site even offered stock information and press releases.