Welcome Home!
posted by Mike in Website Updates, Snooth, Wine Industry
This week we’re proud to unveil two new and exciting additions to Snooth that we think you’ll find extremely useful. The first is our new editorial homepage, and the second is the launch of our much-anticipated articles section. Together, these enhancements kick it up a notch and help make Snooth an even richer online resource for wine.
The new homepage puts the best of Snooth front and center. With a site as large as Snooth it’s helpful to have a starting point that ties it all together. With popular wines, forum topics, news items, food pairings, and easy access to your account, the new homepage is a great place to come whether you’re looking for something specific, or just looking for inspiration.
But the centerpiece of the new homepage is our new articles section. For roughly the past year, Snooth users have been receiving helpful Snooth emails chock full of wine reviews, winery and winemaker spotlights, region profiles, wine deals, and much more. And this week we’re proud to announce it all has a permanent home on Snooth. Starting today, every Snooth email you receive will also be published on the site - meaning you’ll never have to dig through your email to remember the name of that winery, or that intriguing varietal with the funny name… Now it’s all on Snooth and always just a few clicks away.
While we’re thrilled to launch these new features, we’re just as exited to make them even better. We hope to hear your feedback on what’s new, and what else you’d like to see in the future. We also wanted to thank our users who took last month’s user survey. Your feedback was instrumental in creating these features that aim to make Snooth - and wine in general - more enjoyable for everyone.
Cheers!
Mike
Might be useful to have a link from the Forum to the aggregated articles, too. If there is one, I can’t seem to find it…
So….what we were thinking is rather than trying to push the users to a single social aspect of the site, instead to go and make more of the site social. The new homepage is designed to reflect that, providing more access points and a better overview of whats going on to a new user.
The articles didnt appear on the site before, they were just in the emails and it seemed a waste to not have them appear online.
We decided not to put them in the forums as they tend to have a different tone - they are less chatty, specifically. However, the next release will allow commenting on the articles directly.
DM - you’ve often asked for a wiki. One possible solution could be that if a thread ends up with fantastic content (wine fridges, wine flaws, where to stay in Napa etc), then you and the other users would suggest that Greg or someone else writes an article on it. The article would of course call out the contributions of the forums participants, and both the thread and the article would link to each other.
Still a work in progress, but thats the direction we’re thinking.
Philip, had guessed much of what you say from the new home page. However, I’m a firm believer in more links from more places, rather than single channels. Unless you go to the home page, or know to look under the Wine column at top of this page, you won’t know how to get to the articles. Seems like a link in the Forum Categories might increase viewer traffic, as well. Personally, I very rarely go to the Home page. My most common access is to the Forum in response to email notifications.
Having Greg summarize and condense threads seems like one, traditional, way to get edited, brandable content out to your public. But it has scalability limitations. A proper wine wiki could be more powerful. I’m not aware of one yet out here, and if you’re first to market with something that has good content value and works fairly efficiently, this could be another way to position Snooth brilliantly, and to provide more value to readership.