Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com

Yesterday we distributed a press release entitled "WineWeb Releases iPhone Web App for Winery Websites", and today the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Smartphone Apps Fuel Business" that contained the following quote: "... if companies are not finding ways to provide these tools [they] will soon see drop-off from their customers". Good timing or dumb luck? You be the judge.

The WSJ article goes on to say that a typical iPhone app costs $6,000-$8,000 to develop. Hmmm, so I'm guessing we won't be accused of overpricing our app at $250 setup and $20/month. One reason that we can charge these low rates is due to the architecture we have built over the years. We chose early on to build an information system for wineries, not to create one-off winery websites. As any good information technology professional understands, a system should separate data from the presentation from the business logic.

What frustrates me (and I don't mean to go into a rant) is that people don't yet understand that having their brother-in-law create and host a website is not even close to what they'd receive with our website services. Maybe we should call it a "Winery Information Management System for the Direct Sales Channel, including Websites, e-Commerce, Wine Clubs, POS and Customer Management", but that would likely be as confusing (and a bit harder to roll off the tongue).

So, back to the point. We were able to price our iPhone web app service at this price point as we only needed to develop a new presentation layer for these mobile devices. The content that is entered in our system remains the same, it's just presented a bit differently on mobile devices. The business logic, such as allowing a visitor to tweet about an upcoming event, is the same, it's just presented in a way that is optimized for the mobile device. That doesn't mean that the development was easy, as we created over 50 programs to support the uniqueness of the iPhone display and screen flow.

The next time you see your web guy, tell him that you need an iPhone app for your winery, and you want to maintain one set of content for both the website and the iPhone app. As he's running away, take out your iPhone and see what we've done with our Test Vineyards site at m.testvineyards.com.