Of course one usually sips or lightly gulps wine. I have never seen or heard of anyone chugging wine. (If you do, that’s fine of course). In any case, it’s not what I’m talking about in the title. I’m talking about WineLog.net: we’re in it for the long haul… and we couldn’t do it without you.

James at ConsolationChamps wrote a really nice blog post about WineLog today. Last June James took a look at WineLog and Cork’d (one of our competitors) and declared Cork’d as the better site. In today’s post however, James acknowledges our hard work by stating:

I have to admit that since then, the underdog WineLog seems to have closed the gap considerably, and maybe even pushed ahead. While Cork’d attracted a lot of the web design/blog crowd who enjoyed the work of designers/programmers Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin, there seem to be fewer, well, wine people there, and I find the site harder to actually use, especially when searching for wines.

My response is below, which I left as a comment on James’ post. But I also wanted to thank all of our readers and users… because it’s really you guys which make the content at WineLog useful. We’re just trying to make this stuff as fun and easy as possible so you’ll stick around. Thanks for all of YOUR hard work too.

Thanks for the kind words, James. It means a lot to us. We pride ourselves on the strength of our UI and the quality of our users. It’s great to have those both being recognized by you and others.

When WineLog and Cork’d first launched, the Dan’s definitely had a sexier looking site. I didn’t realize how important aesthetics would be to those early reviews. First impressions really do matter. If you read those old TechCrunch or Digg comments, you’ll see a lot of people declaring Cork’d the better site based on its look and tight code.

Even though Cork’d looked better, I still thought our site was easier to use. We tried to make it as easy as possible to get to the information you wanted. “Information architecture” was a term I threw around in the office a lot (and still do). “What do I really want to do?” “What information do I want to see here?” “Where do I expect that button to be?”

Although we didn’t actually have any AJAX features on the site until last October, we were still featured at AjaxMatters.com before that. I think it was the best compliment I’ve ever gotten as a web developer. It turns out fast response times and really good UI can be as pleasing to use as an AJAX-loaded website. We managed to create a website that was so responsive that it felt like AJAX even though it wasn’t.

Since then, we have added some AJAX to places where it helps, and I think we use it smartly. I think everyone realized now that AJAX is just one tool to be used when appropriate.

I also think you make a really good point about the types of users our site has vs. Cork’d and some others (even CellarTracker). We’ve really tried to become part of the wine-blogging and general wine-drinking community. I think we offer a better product for a real wine-lover, but more important than that is that we’ve included the wine-blogging community in the development of our site. We have a number of great people from the wine world blogging on our site and giving us feedback all the time. I think all of this helps people feel the “authenticity” of our site.

Anyway, thanks again for the kind words. We are committed to making WineLog a great site for people looking for great wine and trying to keep track of their wine logs. The site is constantly being refined, and new features come out as fast as we can integrate them without cluttering up the basic experience.

We’ve just launched mobile access via http://winelog.mobi. Check it out and let us know what you think.