Publishers/
San Francisco Chronicle – “The Press”
Background
The Press provides a collection of winery reviews, maps and recommendations to tourists and locals alike wanting to tour and taste California’s wine country.
A team of experts and journalists, led by The San Francisco Chronicle, review California wineries based on merit and prominence. They personally visit the locations and write honest, unbiased reviews upheld to the same standards and values as other critiques published in The San Francisco Chronicle.
The Opportunity
With the mission to be a one-stop travel resource for Wine Country, a solution was needed that allowed users to create, plan, customize and map out their own wine tour. This enhanced experience required a visual layout capability for mapping purposes and an easy-to-use application format.
Key Services Provided
Make
- Graphic Design, Illustration & Iconography
- Prototyping
- Website Development
The Result
In response to the client’s request, the Relish development team delivered solutions to improve the ease of maintaining the website and provide more control over the content and how it’s delivered, displayed and experienced by the end-user.
Relish rebuilt a proprietary website and turned it into a WordPress based format for the purpose of programming a custom plugin to operate within that system. Site custom features include a trip planning tool and a filterable map for primary use. The project consisted of several elements:
- Account sign-in
- “Plan Your Trip” feature: allows the user to create his/her own tour and map out directions and driving time between wineries
- “Add to trip” button: ability to add venues and create a list of wineries to visit
- Trip calculation feature: determine length of trip(s)
- Pre-built tour options
- Staff picks of top choice tours
- Filterable mapping tool: ability to map out specific areas in California, including sub-regions and vineyards
- Visual tools to accompany features
As a result of these improvements, the user can bring in new search parameters or change the layout within the trip planning and mapping tools to filter by region, sub-region, or a variety of other categories including wine specialties and cost.
For the administrator, these tools provide the ability to draw shapes on a map and better organize the website to define specific regions.