Brilliant Gin
London Dry Gin producer e-commerce

01.

The Brief

You have to be very confident in your product to call it brilliant but that is exactly what Gail and Graham Woolston did a few years ago! They are a local independent gin producer and have developed their own branded gin, currently in 3 different flavours: London Dry Gin, Raspberry Gin and Distillers Cut. It is most definitely a Premium Product and is sold at establishments including Harrods, Fortum and Masons, Cowdray Park, Chichester Festival Theatre and many other outlets around the UK.

Challenges with previous website

When we first met them, they had been having many challenges with their existing website. It was built with WordPress and used WooCommerce as the e-commerce solution. We love WordPress ourselves, we have used nothing else for the last 15 years but we have a different approach to most other web designers, we don’t use 3rd party templates.

The original Brilliant Gin website, however, had been built with an off the shelf template. It cost $59 and was available from Theme Forest. Unfortunately, as is always the case with 3rd party templates, there were many errors in the code. In this case, there were over 70 errors on the home page alone. Fixing these issues would be beyond the skill of the designer who bought the template and would have broken the licence agreement anyway. This meant that, no matter how nice the website may look, the errors would make it difficult to gain good rankings with Google.

This is because Google does not have an interest in the look of a website, as Google is blind of course. What Google looks for are things like code quality, how quickly a website takes to load, whether it is accessible for people with disabilities and so on.

The Brilliant Gin website had a speed score of 6 (out of 100) on a mobile. That is very slow indeed. Websites with a lot of graphics and particularly ones with e-commerce always take longer to load but, even so, 6 is a very poor score.