Recent Work: New Site for Klein Constantia
We were hugely honoured to be tasked with building a brand new online home for one of the most highly venerated wine estates in the world, Klein Constantia.
Dating back to 1685, Klein Constantia is set amidst ancient trees on the upper foothills of the Constantiaberg, with views across False Bay. The perfect location for cool climate wines, Klein Constantia produces some of South Africa’s top wines, including one of the world’s best natural sweet wines, Vin de Constance.
The 146-hectare estate originally formed part of “Constantia”, a vast property established by Simon van der Stel, the first governor of the Cape. This particular valley was chosen not only for its beauty but also for the decomposed granite soils on its slopes, gently cooled by ocean breezes.
The Website
Tenacity Works has enjoyed a long-standing partnership with the team at Klein Constantia having taken care of their digital marketing needs for several years. Getting the green light for an all-new website meant we were able to fuse our experience of the brand with the very latest web technologies to create a beautiful new online home for this exceptional estate.
IA, UX, and UI Design
There are many facets to the Klein Constantia experience. The rich history, the highly coveted wines, the dining and tasting experiences, the complex terroir as well as the grounds of this beautiful estate. We needed to create a site structure and user experience that made navigating the site easy, allowing the user to experience the estate without becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available. We were also very aware of the distinct user journeys involved in a site of this nature, which meant we designed the experience with both discoverability and specific user tasks in mind.
Following our long-standing methodology, the user interface designs were crafted over high fidelity wireframes in Figma. We then created a design system called Clara which was used to define every styling aspect of the site from colours to buttons and typography. Both the wires and UI were thoroughly prototyped and tested prior to developer hand-off.
Development
Working with the approved Figma UI designs, the TW dev team set about creating the site’s front-end markup in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Once each front-end page has been crafted and thoroughly tested the team began integrating the markup into the selected content management system, in this case, WordPress. Tenacity Works has been working with the WordPress platform for nearly fifteen years. During that time we have developed custom frameworks and methodologies that allow us to decrease development time whilst ensuring a consistently high level of quality. Once the build is complete and the content has been loaded, we run through our quality assurance and testing loops until the finished site is ready to hand over to the client.
eCommerce
The Commerce7 platform was selected to facilitate the eCommerce aspects of the new Klein Constantia site. With Commerce7 we were able to integrate the following features:
- Comprehensive data management including wine collections and inventory management
- Club subscriptions with full customer control
- Reservations management for wine tastings
- Full customer insight via CRM
With a number of integration options available, Tenacity Works made it possible for users to browse and purchase the full range of Klein Constantia wines via a custom theme which displays the data stored within Commerce7. Reservations and club management options were integrated as well to deliver a comprehensive eCommerce winery experience.
Mobile
Having studied analytics from the previous version of the site, we were able to determine that a majority of the users visited the site via mobile and that certain information (such as directions and opening times) tended to be a priority in mobile use cases. We were able to craft an experience that catered to mobile users whilst not diminishing the overall impact of the site.
Conclusion
We are always proud of the work we do with Klein Constantia. The end product of this particular project is an elegant, modern, and highly effective site that will help extend the reach and reputation of the brand for years to come.
Visit the estate at KleinConstantia.com
Are you part of the team at a winery or wine distributor looking to build a comprehensive web and eCommerce solution? We can help!