HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US
It’s our 10th Birthday / Anniversary – We started The New Zealand Wine Directory, in Christchurch on 1 Dec 2009 and have now been supporting the New Zealand Wine Industry for 10 Years!
We are very proud to be part of the NZ Wine community online as a key online resource, helping 1000’s of wine lovers around the world connect with NZ Wine each month.
A huge vote of thanks to all our Visitors, followers on Social Media, Wine makers, supporters and many Sponsors and Partners over the last years – without your continued support we would not be here.
The New Zealand Wine Directory has been a labour of love for JB since he started the NZ Wine Links Blog back in the late 1990s, just as the NZ Wine industry started exploring the use of the World Wide Web as a marketing platform.
Until Google launched in 1998 finding New Zealand wine online was difficult if not impossible (unless you were a techie.) Wine lovers really had no idea how to find wine websites in New Zealand, you had to use a Phone Book! Remember that?
There’s a great article on the beginning of the Internet in NZ here:
https://teara.govt.nz/en/digital-media-and-the-internet
A lot has happened since then! Now nearly every winery / vineyard / winemaker now has a website with e-commerce to sell wine online, a newsletter e-mail database, wine clubs, a blog and integrated social media with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter… These are now an absolute necessity in the 21st century for connecting with potential customers, sharing information, promoting their wines / brands, news, events, wine releases and so much more…
As a Librarian and later, a Library Manager, learning about and exploring the uses of the Internet, and an amateur wine maker, JB wondered if there was a way to connect people to the few NZ wine websites that were gradually coming online. JB started teaching himself how to build websites and eventually launched ‘NZ Wine Links’ which had a small collection of websites.
Through many iterations and updates over the last 10 years, the NZ Wine Directory is now the ‘go-to’ resource for all things New Zealand Wine related – it is a curated collection of over 3,000 website links, organized into by category for easy access. https://nzwinedirectory.co.nz/about/site-map/ and 1000s of links in over 850 Blog posts.
The website is now getting 30-40 thousand page views each month, with people searching for information on New Zealand wine, visiting from both search engines and social media.
The Website had 760,000+ page views in 2018 (people not bots) and there were 3,735,092 hits on the site (people and search bots) – we will surpass that by the end of 2019.
With social media our reach is 1000’s more through posts from The NZ Wine Directory blog shared on Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and more, and JB’s wine reviews are well received on Instagram too.
“I could never have imagined back in 2009 what we would be doing in 10 years but here we are. I’m retiring in January 2020, but we’ll keep the NZ Wine Directory going for as long as I can – here’s to another 10 years?