Its About Time for Wine
Washington state loves its wine (who doesn’t), and with the local wine industry enjoying continued, rapid growth it’s important that the Washington Wine Commission website keeps up with the needs of the expanding collection of state wineries, vineyards, and other wine-related businesses. Thats why we recently launched a new version of http://www.washingtonwine.org, which includes a powerful new set of tools focused on providing a more streamlined approach to managing contacts and their relation to the vast collection of WA state wineries and vineyards.
The new industry section provides a series of intuitive interfaces for adding individual business profiles and contacts, and more importantly for relating these businesses to the individuals that own and operate them. The resulting complex web of relationships provides a vital source of data for the Washington Wine Commission itself, as to help them continue to expand the services they provide to the WA state wine industry. The new industry section also provides a central mechanism for individual wine-related businesses to manage their growing collection of contacts and their presence on the Washington Wine Commission website — where consumers can browse local wineries and vineyards using an interactive map, search for local wines by vintage and variety, and much more.
In addition to the new industry section, we’ve also refreshed the Restaurant Awards sub-site with an updated design. The color palette was refreshed to conform with the featured glass work of noted artist Jesse Kelly. We also reflowed the submission form to introduce a multi-step, more intuitive process — including a killer jQuery file upload control that makes uploading logos and supporting materials a breeze. Definitely take a look.
Our team also worked behind the scenes on this release to introduce a series of performance improvements as to handle the steady increase in traffic. Our UI team worked to reduce the CSS and javascript required for the site’s presentation — resulting in 84% less CSS and javascript in total. This makes a pretty big difference and is particularly impressive when you consider that the new toolset involved the introduction of new, rich interfaces which required expansion of the site’s styles! Our database team also worked to improve performance by refining the data model for industry entities, helping to reduce query times which drastically affect the site’s performance.
We’re extremely happy with this release. Check out the site today — we’d love to hear what you think.