Project

Berry Bros. & Rudd

Web site

BB&R, 1995 (graphic design by Denison Design)

In 1995, Berry Bros. & Rudd, then a 300-yr old wine merchant with a Royal Warrant, saw what Limitless had done for Sainsbury's with Wine Direct and asked Limitless to build them a more elaborate online wine shop to help them serve customers in the far east.

They believed that they could offer a unique service by selling fine and rare wines from their broking service. One of their objectives was to target the Japanese market, where it was cheaper to buy fine wine from the UK and have it delivered, than to buy it locally.

Berry's supplied wine list data which was then used to generate pages for the site. There were six versions of each page: a set with and without HTML tables (which was a new feature in 1995), and a set showing prices in one of three currencies: sterling, dollars and yen. The site also adjusted the displayed totals in the shopping basket to match the currently-selected currency.

BB&R wine list, 1995 (graphic design by Denison Design)

We worked with the design company, Denison Design, for the first time on this project. Tessa Denison designed a dramatic black and gold home page and then colour- and icon-coded the three main page types using deep colours - blue for the chateau pages, green for the wine lists and red for the remaining pages.

We made all their graphics web-ready and scanned all the wine labels. We marked up the main content which, with templates, was used to generate complete web pages.

We helped with the site software, including generating the site's pages from the wine data, and managing the shopping basket, both of which were functions that had to be written from scratch in 1995, since no useful database-driven web development systems existed.

BB&R chateau page, 1995 (graphic design by Denison Design)

Berry's wanted to convey tradition and quality through the design and to maintain their personal service by completing orders by telephone. The site was used to illustrate good design in the 1996 book Official HTML Publishing for Netscape by Stuart Harris and Gayle Kidder.

Magellan awarded it 4 stars in 1996, who said that the Berry Bros. & Rudd web site:

"excelled in each of [their] criteria for evaluating web sites, namely Depth of Content, Ease of Exploration and Net Appeal This is the highest rating an Internet site can achieve in Magellan, McKinley's comprehensive Internet directory of nearly 2 million sites and 40,000 reviews."

The BBR web site continues to be developed by Limitless.

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