Now that I’ve convinced myself that I am not a whore, I’m going to go ahead and talk a bit about Wine Labels, a new site from those CRAZY GUYS over at WineLibrary.com. The site allows users to search for, tag, and comment on wine labels. And that’s about it. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a bit of fun and could just be the start of something beautiful.

What They’ve Done Right
The first thing Wine Labels has done right is to create the site at all. They have something that is interesting, functional, and useful to web users. I’m sure WineLibrary has a lot more in store for the site, but it is smart of them to release it now before it has become bloated with features.

There are definitely some features that the site could use down the road. But since the site is available now and being used by the public, they’ll get a lot of valuable feedback on what works and what doesn’t, what would be nice and what we be like totaly sweet. All of this feedback will temper release 2 or release 1.1 and it will be better because of it.

The second thing Wine Labels has done right is to focus on the label. If you want to rally people around wine, the label is a great place to start. (I’m jealous now that WineLog doesn’t have labels and other images yet.) The label is the literal identity of a wine. With no standard naming convention for wines and bottle text in other languages, the appearance of a label is how a lot of folks find new wines and recall wines they’ve drunk before.

I have a little bit of experience trying to grow a social network around wine, so there are a few things that I see in Wine Labels that will work to their benefit. And two things every social network should try to do are (1) get people to link to your site and (2) make it as easy as possible for people to add content.

Wine Labels does both of these things fairly well. A goal for WineLog, and any site like us, is to become the center of the wine universe online. Pretty lofty, but what does it mean? We crave attention. It’s how we grow and how we get paid. When you search for “mano a mano wine” at Google, I want my site to be at the top of the list. (If you check, the top link goes to non other than WineLibrary. WineLog makes an appearance at the bottom of the first page. Not too shabby.)

So how do you accomplish this feat of search engine manipulation? Easy, you get people to link to your page about Mano a Mano. WineLog encourages this by having useful review and tasting note information on the wine, including similar wines and links to purchase the wine. People who find this information useful might link to our page.

Wine Labels right now just has tags and comments on the wines, and of course the wine label itself. But they also have some code front and center to allow people to show the wine label on their own sites. This is a theme that all web site owners should pick up on. If you give something useful to people to include on their own sites, they’re going to link back to you. And more links = more Google juice. Instead of thinking “What can I put on my site to get people to come here?”, think “what can I put on other people’s sites to get them to come here?”

Wine Labels also does #2 pretty well, by only requiring you to enter a name and email address to post a comment. This simple interface is similar to a comments section found on a blog, which prompted me to ask Gary if the site was built on top of a blog-based content management system. Gary tells me it is all custom code. So good for their team for implementing a comment system that has some of what makes blogs great and easy to interact with.

Also, the site doesn’t require any validation at all to add a tag. As long as they can keep the spammers from breaking things, this is a great feature for them.

What They Could Do Better
The comment system is easy to use, but it’s also the first of my pet peeves. The site should remember the information you entered before so you don’t have to retype your name, email address, and website every time you post a comment. Lucky for Wine Labels, this will be a quick fix for them.

A few more pet peeves and then I’ll get into some bigger stuff.
- In the remembering things department, the search box should remember what I just searched for. People like to tweak a search, check for mis-spellings, or at least see what it was they searched for. This typically outweighs any annoyance people have at having to clear a search box before searching again.
- On both browsers I viewed the site on (IE7 and FF2 for windows), the dashed line around the homepage search box is off-center. I’m not sure if this is intentional. But even if it is, it looks like a mistake. I think it would look better with the dashed line lined up around the edge of the search box.
- It’s pretty cool that the “add your 2 cents” box hovers down the screen with you. You don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the page to comment. However, on pages without a lot of scroll, the box covers up the links on the right side. Even though these links are essentially ads, it bugs me that I can see what’s behind them. It’s like a tease… On second thought, maybe this is intentional… to get people to try to see their ads. Ok, nevermind, these guys are geniuses!
- This one is a little bigger, but still easy enough to fix. The tag cloud should be easier to find. For those having trouble, here it is:http://labels.winelibrary.com/tags. As of this writing, you have to find a wine label and click on the “other popular tags” link below the form to add tags. The tag cloud should be shown on the homepage or there should at least be a link to it on the homepage.

Features I’d Like to See
Okay, here are my “2 cents” on what Wine Labels should focus on next.

So Wine Labels seems to do a decent job of letting you search for wine labels. Now they need to build tools to let users browse for wine labels. What could those tools be?
- They could start by adding pagination to the search results. Right now if you search for nothing, it shows just one page of maybe 50 or so results. They say they have 10,000 wines in there (and I believe them), so I know I’m not seeing everything.
- Some kind of recent activity list (like the one we have on our homepage) will help avid users of the site find out what’s hot. It will also give the impression that the site is active (assuming there is a decent amount of activity on the site, which their undoubtably will be).

The general idea is to make it easier for users to find interesting content. Sure most people will get to what they want by searching (through the site’s interface or through Google). Almost 75% of the traffic on all sites I’ve worked on come from a Google search. However, most of those users won’t be your content creators. Those folks are coming to the site directly, and we have to cater to these folks even if they are not the bulk of our traffic. They are our loyal users, and we love them.

Another nice feature in this vein would be to include some persistance for the users. I know I said I loved the fact that you didn’t have to sign up to comment, but that shouldn’t keep them from giving inspired users the option to create an account. I think users would love to have an avatar by their comments (like Gary has on this page). It would also be nice to be able to click on a user and see all of their other comments. Digg is a site that I think does comments and user pages well. Perhaps it could be used as a basis for Wine Labels.

So that’s all I have to say about Wine Labels… right now. I’m sure the folks at WineLibrary have thought of a lot of this and much more that I overlooked or didn’t think of. Maybe you and they will learn something from this.

I will keep an eye on the site’s development (I’m sure Gary won’t let me forget about it). And when they add star ratings, cellar tracking, and recommendations, I’ll be sure to come back and trash the newly formed competition. In the meantime I can endorse casual perusal of the site, but be sure to come back to WineLog and… do whatever it is that you do here anyway.