Roguish Website
A few weeks ago, I whinged about the terrible use of brewery websites:
Rogue has always been proud to put its beer first and immodesty claims an almost transcendental mission: "Rogue is a small revolution, which expresses itself through handcrafted Ales, Porters, Stouts, Lagers and Spirits, and this is the way we conduct our business. The spirit of the Rogue brand, even the name, suggests doing things differently, a desire and a willingness to change the status quo." On the website, they are as good as their promise. Good job!
(Hat tip: Beer Northwest.)
The problem is that the sites are designed to sell rather than inform. It is not dissimilar to the experience I used to have as a paid writer when a brewery would send me on a tour with a PR flack. She would hustle me around to the things I didn't want to see and talk about things like "strong brand identification" that I couldn't care less about. Whenever we'd get near to something I'd like to see--like the brewery--I'd feel a firm hand on my arm and feel myself getting dragged off to look at the latest label mock-up or something equally uninteresting.It is therefore with appreciation and thanks I note that the redesigned Rogue website rocks. The older version wasn't bad--it did have details on the beers and brewery--but it suffered from information creep and had become a shaggy-dog site. This new one is cleaner, the information is rich and the layout intuitive.
Rogue has always been proud to put its beer first and immodesty claims an almost transcendental mission: "Rogue is a small revolution, which expresses itself through handcrafted Ales, Porters, Stouts, Lagers and Spirits, and this is the way we conduct our business. The spirit of the Rogue brand, even the name, suggests doing things differently, a desire and a willingness to change the status quo." On the website, they are as good as their promise. Good job!
(Hat tip: Beer Northwest.)