Creative Website Design Company

The Brief

Katnook Estate Coonawarra, part of the Wingara Wine Group, produces some of Australia’s best wines. Lava has worked closely with Katnook on a full redevelopment of its main website. Key requirements were the need to achieve a visually outstanding piece, with the feature being an online shopping facility where customers can add items to a crate then pay securely. Katnook needed to be able to administer the site via a CMS, such as adding products, changing prices, and managing orders on the back-end. Other deliverables included an e-news facility with an integrated member database, along with a Cellar Club membership system.

Lava feels the Katnook solution is one of our best yet. We’re very proud of it!

Lava's Solution

A design brief was established through a questionnaire process, along with face-to-face discussions. The brief was well defined and very clear. Katnook wanted a sophisticated, stylish and contemporary look and feel, adhering closely to its corporate branding style guide. A particularly interesting aspect of Katnook’s brief was to select photography that is quite people oriented and fairly organic, rather than the typical wine site ‘panoramic image’ style. Lava feels this was integral to achieving an appropriate yet distinct looking site, with real warmth.

Two separate navigation menus were used, one horizontal to cater for the information based sections such as listings of upcoming Events, a world-wide Stockists list and Image gallery. A vertical menu is more prominent, acting as a key driver to finding wines in the online shop. Users can filter the wines using a simple drop down options (brand, type and price).

There are two ways a user can search for wines. We have developed a fairly conventional order form, where they can simply select wines and quantities, then proceed to a checkout. However, Katnook wanted users to also have the option of learning a little bit more about each wine before they make their purchase. Each wine is presented along with bottle images, a description and any accompanying media releases, which the user can merge and review. This informative approach is designed to enable users to more fully immerse themselves in the wines and make well informed decisions. Wines and quantities can be selected and added to a shopping cart facility, which feeds into a secure integrated credit card ordering process.

A really fantastic feature of the Katnook site is a Cellar Club facility. Users can register online, and this registration means that when logged in, they can purchase specially packaged wines. But that’s not all! The Cellar Club has been built so members can also set up automated orders at set intervals. For example, they can have a set order (which they do have the ability to vary) which is automatically triggered at say every 3 months.