Transcript of “Bubb + Pooley website reaction”

( Screencast of the Google homepage )

NARRATOR:
All right, let's get started with this. Website reviews over wine. What am I drinking? Bubb and Pooley chardonnay. Let's do it. [Wine being poured into a glass.]

I thought it'd be a bit silly in doing a new websites and wine video series that we don't actually start with a, a wine maker. So cheers, Bubb and Pooley. Let's see what we got.

I'm not gonna go straight into the website, I'm gonna Google cuz I just wanna see how some of the content renders.

( Narrator enters the search term into Google, "bubb and pooley". Search results are returned. )

First of all, we know that the Google Business listing seems accurate, so there's a tick box and I wanna see that the SEO kind of snippets all make sense and the site links have picked up the main content.

So generally with a wine site, yeah, you wanna know about wines, probably the shop. Oh, hang on. We've got some Lorem Ipsum here. Some filler content. So something's happened there with maybe some boiler plate, not sure just yet.

( When the narrator mentions "Lorem Ipsum", they highlight text in the search results with the nonsensical words "Voluptates voluptas" )

Actually, both of, all the other ones are sharing the same content. So there might be an SEO thing there. There might be this probably an orphan page. I'm gonna guess. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now. I might check up on that a little bit later.

So, wine sites, what I'm thinking, you have to shop for wine obviously, there's probably a bit of a story or their cellar door. A lot of wine makers offer a wine club. So these are the sorts of things that I'm wanting to see when I'm kind of first looking at this page.

( The narrator has yet to visit the Bubb + Pooley website. )

And I think second of all, I wanna see a design that. I think it's complimentary to, you know, some of the design that they've put in practice on their, their wine bottles. So for Bubb and Pooley, it's quite minimalist, quite modern. It's quite a nice detail with the, debossing and the logo. And they've got some little handwritten-looking typeface for the vintage of the year. So this was kind of what I'm expecting, kind of muted tones as well. Let's see what we got.

( Screencast changes to the Bubb + Pooley website, with the prompt "Are you over 18 years of age?" and a yes/no button. )

Okay, good. An age check where I don't have to put in my actual birthday. Thank you.

( The Bubb + Pooley homepage has a banner filling most of the browser window. The banner shows wine bottles artistically arranged on their sides. )

See, it's pretty clean. I like the photography that they've used. There's the labels that I'm talking about. Interesting though, the main navigation really just gives you cart, login, and cart again? Is that cart and cart? That's cart and the full cart. Okay.

Missing kind of the actual just purchasing mention there and nothing about contact or about pages so that's a little bit surprising, but let's see. Let's scroll.

( The narrator scrolls down the homepage and reads the content. )

"The use of concrete vessels is no experiment either"

So something like that. I'm no wine guy, so I don't know really what concrete vessels means, whether that's good or, or bad or, or interesting or, or, or well-rehearsed in this space. But something like an about page or our techniques or something like that might have lent itself there.

( The narrator scrolls to stop at four wine bottles being displayed. )

And we're going straight into the wines, just straight into four or three with one sold out. So four wines. So they're not offering that much. So I think this is good if you've, we've only got a few products. Let's get down to business and make 'em available. Don't hide them through a products page, although we did see in that Google site links a product section, so we're gonna have to chase that up in a bit.

Straight to cart, which is good. That's fine. We're going, especially in wine sites, you know, you've got this deliberation between, you know, offering multiples of six or buying by the bottle. You're going by the six, obviously.

( When the narrator says "straight to cart", underneath each bottle is a button with the words "Add to cart". Above the button lists its price, and the quantity of 6 x 750ml. )

Finishing up with the "mail list" and footer, "about". Again, "account", "contact" and the old Insta. I wonder if Insta's got that concrete vessel thing going.

( The narrator switches screencast to Bubb + Pooley's Instagram profile, and scrolls down a grid of images. The scrolling stops on discovery of one of the concrete vessels. The vessel is a spherical shape with a polish concrete surface. )

Hmm. Yeah. There they are. It's like an, like an orb and ooh, this one's an egg. I like it. Yeah.

So that kind of stuff could be interesting in telling the story. I think that's a lot about winemakers. They do have an interesting tradition or story behind them, and people really want to get into that if they're not just going straight to to buy a wine, so let's buy some wine. Why not?

( The narrator clicks the "Add to cart button". )

I like this. Okay. So overlaid cart. Again I think a sensible choice when there's minimal product range.

Because I can afford it. Let's do it.

( The narrator attempts to add 100,000 bottles to their shopping cart. )

Oh! "The available inventory is 1092." OK that's interesting it's exposing its stock limits. I'll just buy 100 bottles. 100 by six.

Again, I think we've probably been taken to a third party kind of checkout process, which is fine.

Kind of feels like I have to sign up. But all this looks pretty straight forward.

( When the narrators says "looks pretty straight forward", they are scrolling through a checkout form that appears to follow standard eCommerce conventions. )

To get back yep. I can go straight back there. Cool.

( The screencast returns to the homepage. )

So for a simple site with a simple product range, not too bad. I like, again, straight to business. Just wanna make sure the sense check that those pages that we saw in Google probably just need to be cleaned up. So I'm guessing, you know this, is this a WordPress site? Yes it is.

( The narrator uses a browser tool to inspect more information about the page and recognises a folder structure unique to WordPress. )

If we went into this sitemap, we'll probably see a bunch of boiler plate pages, so, I see we've got a club, we've got a, there's "our wines", we've also got a blog. So are they hiding that or… No clubs, sorry.

( The narrator is scrolling through a list of URLs. When they mention "our wines", the narrator has identified the page by its URL - "https:///bubbandpooley.com.au/our-wines/". )

"Blog".

"Blueberry pancakes" and a "Hello World".

Yeah. So this kind of stuff is just boiler plate WordPress content, probably with this theme when it was originally set up. It probably just needs a little bit housekeeping to make sure that those pages well really don't exist . If you're not gonna use them, don't don't have them here.

You'll see if I went back to Google did this old trick to see the site pages that have been indexed. Yeah, we've got 53 results and not that many pages on this smallish website.

( The screencast returns to original Google search results. )

So you can see here, yeah, more Lorem Ipsum and stuff, "desserts", "American", "uncategorised", that sort of thing. So I'd tidy up that.

But otherwise, straight to the point. You know, a bit of extra detail would be nice with the, the story, I think, especially with these concrete vessels, if that's an interesting technique that other winemakers aren't using the labels and you know, the design seems to marry up. So I think they get a solid pass. So cheers to Bubb and Pooley. Tasty wine, too.

Alright. Ciao.