Craft Ale & Breweries Web Development agency

Consumers are drinking fewer pints overall, but have developed an appreciation for beers that offer a different drinking experience – and they’re willing to pay more for that privilege.

While the drink itself is of course important, brewery websites and craft ale brands’ websites need to find a way to portray the spirit of the beverage to entice visitors to track it down in physical form.

That can include the ability to order online for home delivery, but could equally be a case of creating a microbrewery website to showcase craft ales using principles of branding, graphic design and consumer psychology to evoke the necessary interest and emotions in site viewers.

If you choose not to offer the option to purchase online, there are plenty of alternative innovative ways to engage with your visitors, from multimedia to embedding your social network presence into your homepage, along with more creative methods.

At visionsharp we work with brewers nationwide on bespoke brewery websites that attract consumers and keep them engaged, encouraging them to place an online order, register for marketing communications and/or use your website to find a bricks-and-mortar retailer near them.

Brand-focused web design for craft breweries

Craft breweries and the craft ales they produce depend on positive perception to sell well and at a higher price per pint, helping them to remain competitive in the British beer market.

Between 2000 and 2017, BBPA statistics show the number of barrels of beer sold in the UK fell from around 23 million to about 13 million.

Investing in a visually stunning contemporary craft ale website shows your product in its best light, helping to reinforce its perceived value even among consumers who have not yet tasted it.

The right look can influence consumers’ buying decisions, and can even encourage them to go out of their way to find a pint of your product on sale.

There are several core capabilities that brewery and craft ale websites need to offer in order to maximise sales while keeping in line with UK regulations.

The visionsharp design team can use custom WordPress templates, PHP web pages and Concrete5 CMS design to incorporate these into your site.

Just a few of the main examples include:

• • Age verification to ensure visitors to your site are over 18 (typically a simple birthdate check on your homepage).
•  ‘Find a retailer’ search function and/or embedded map of on-trade venues and off-trade retailers who stock your products.
• Ability to register for product updates and special offers or place an order for home delivery.

We welcome more creative briefs and can put our design team’s considerable experience and technical expertise into overcoming any challenges you may have encountered in the past using innovative solutions integrated into your bespoke brewery website.

To stand out among an ever-increasing number of craft ale labels and breweries of all sizes, a front-page search ranking is a must.

At visionsharp we keep search optimisation firmly in mind throughout the design process, ensuring that we meet the latest recommendations by Google on issues like page load speed and mobile responsive website design – more about that below.

We can add detailed metadata to your website to help the search engines understand what your content is about and to have it appear in the search results for relevant words and phrases.

And by building around intuitive content management systems like Concrete5 and WordPress, combined with custom PHP pages that seamlessly integrate bespoke functionality, we ensure you can update your website in the future with SEO-friendly content.

That might be new product information, special offers, multimedia content such as photos and videos of your brewery or of in-person event marketing, or any other kind of regularly updated content to help your website appear active and keep you ranking highly.

Engaging with your social channels

Brand advocates are a powerful way to raise awareness and build positive brand perception, especially for microbreweries and new craft ale brands that don’t already have a well established audience or customer base.

If you have a social media presence or are thinking of building one, we can integrate this into your website with seamless design, so that any future content you post shows immediately on your homepage too.

Find out more

To learn more about visionsharp’s work with breweries and craft ale brands, contact us today. Our design team will be happy to share examples of our innovative and creative website designs for breweries in the past.

Initial consultations are free and if you have an existing website, we can arrange an audit of that too so we can make recommendations based on the traffic you already receive. You can contact us by email or telephone, or fill in our contact form and our design team will get back to you as soon as possible.