Cofield Wines Success Story

Within two or three days of going live people had bought wine.

Tell us about your business.

Cofield Wines is a boutique winery owned and operated by Damien and Melanie Cofield. It’s a family business in the Rutherglen wine region and is renowned for its sparkling wine.

Tell us about your old website

I was almost ashamed of our old website it was so out of date, and didn’t have the functionality that visitors wanted.

It was completely static, boring and uninviting.

It did not distinguish us as it should have, nor represent the winery’s real identity. In fact, we had been actively avoiding promoting our website because we knew it wasn’t up to scratch.

It was also very cumbersome to change our old website – we had been known to wait 10 days to get a response from our website developer. This made it difficult to run the business, so part of my brief to Web123 was that I should be able to make a change instantly.

Why did you decide to build a new website?

Apart from the fact our existing website was so terrible, our customers were asking for online ordering facilities to allow them to purchase wine quickly and easily. I also wanted to people to be able to sign up online to our Cellar Circle wine club so they could receive ongoing information from us about our wines, promotions and events.

What made you choose Web123?

The price was certainly an important factor, Web123 was so affordable it even crossed my mind that something must be missing. Happily that wasn’t the case at all. Web123 built up a great working relationship with us and even put us in touch with a number of their existing clients who gave them amazing referrals. It was also important to me that Web123 had an office in a regional centre not too far from Rutherglen, going to their office and meeting the team in person helped me put my trust in them.

The truth now…was it hard to build your own website?

I will admit I was a little daunted at first – mostly because the entire task of creating a new website fell on my shoulders. But within two days I fell in love with the Web123 website builder. If I got stuck I called the Web123 team and got my question answered immediately and any problem that popped up was fixed in an instant. It really was a dream process.

It took us around a month to get the website live. I didn’t want to rush it and I did it all on my own, including taking all the photos for the site. This saved us lots of money and I really enjoyed flexing my creative muscles. Web123 even gave me a few tips for doing this.

Now that I’m familiar with the system – which didn’t take very long – everything is easy to do. The Web123 website builder is so simple, I just login and away I go.

How has your new website helped improve your business?

Within two or three days of going live people had bought wine and joined the membership club. This was without any promotion on our part. Now people are buying online regularly and joining our member club almost every day. It has sped up our ordering process enormously – now we receive an order at 10am from a customer online and we have it dispatched by 5pm that evening.

As well as the online purchasing facilities, the email marketing is great. The fact that I can manage a database of 2000 easily and send them all an email today – about a sale, new products or an event we’re hosting – without any fuss is a big plus for the business. It’s all at my fingertips now!

It’s an enormous time and energy saver for us that the website is now self-managed. In five minutes I am able to add a new wine to the site, upload a new photo or make any changes to content we need. All the website changes that used to take more than week for someone else to do we are now in control of.

How would you describe working with Web123?

Great service - they always say yes! I’ve worked with some big companies over the years but my experience with Web123 has been nothing but extremely professional. They are extremely customer focused and exceeded every expectation I had. 

Web123 has also been very happy to test the limits of their own technology, and even add to its capabilities and functionality to meet our needs. I was very impressed that they were willing to grow their technology with us.

What would you say to a business thinking about building a Web123 website?

I would rate the experience of building and managing a Web123 website far higher than any other dealing I’ve had with a website or web developer. Web123 is not confusing, not complicated - it’s simple, straightforward and just gets the job done, fast.

Working with Web123 will make you wonder why it’s so expensive elsewhere. It scares me to think we could have spent $20,000 on a website and still not have been as happy with the end product as we are now.

If you could give Web123 one piece of feedback what would it be?

Keep doing what you’re doing!