In our post on Growing Business Relationships, we talked about building a website that best reflects the character and spirit of a client. Today we're going to consider strategies for selling tickets and subscription services in the digital space. For that, we take a look at Annie's Wine Cottage.
(Post does pair well with Annie's "thoughtfully chosen wine bottles.")
When Chek Creative stepped in to partner with Annie on her website, there were a few considerations. For the online component of a business depending on retail sales and customer interaction, a couple things are crucial:
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The Events Calendar
In this case, the events calendar would have to seamlessly house both externally ticketed and free events without looking hectic. -
The Retail Page
The website needed an effective platform for selling the shop's wine club and gift card options.
Building an Effective Events Calendar
To make an events calendar that would check all the necessary boxes, our development team actually combined two. Annie's Wine Cottage was ticketing events through Eventbrite, so we kept those in place. By adding the shop's upcoming free events into WordPress and pulling the pre-existing/ticketed events with Eventbrite API, our team had a well-integrated system. The calendar now automatically organizes both sets of events by date on one sleek display.
When it came to the design itself, we partnered with our friend, Miranda Wagner, to make Annie's website really pop. Looking at the design of the events page, she cites the organization of information into appropriate type-styles and sizes as a big part of what makes the page work. Because of this "hierarchy of type," anything an event-goer needs to know is easily digestible. "A user could quickly skim the page and pull the main information... which is the sign of a good events page."
With our client's calendar both organized and presented in a clear, engaging way, the events page is good to go.
Building an Effective Retail Page
Whenever a site offers subscription services, gift cards, or anything else for sale, you are, of course, going to run into some sort of online payment scenario. For obvious reasons, it's important to set up a platform you trust.
Stripe has been a preferred payment platform ever since we built our first app, Flavvr. We've used it to house payment options for Pioneer Landscaping and donations for The Ohio Eastern Star Home. Before too long, we'll be integrating it into an exciting new real estate referral project called, AgentPins, too. Needless to say, we went with Stripe again for Annie's Wine Club and gift card selection.
So what about the page design? Miranda's hand-drawn illustrations for the Wine Club page lend a sense of playfulness which somehow just fits with the happy elegance of a wine club and the Annie's Wine Cottage brand as a whole.
When strategizing about events calendars and retail pages, there are often a lot of considerations. Much depends on the type of retail business you're dealing with, true. Regardless of that, though, you can always count on a streamlined events calendar and an intuitive retail section to drive site visitors in the right direction for your clients. Hopefully this provides you with some ideas for setting up your next project. Cheers!
