Crushpad is a winery who’s focus is on allowing it’s clients to make a custom barrel of their own high-end wine. Sourcing grapes from Napa, Sonoma, Paso Robles and Bordeaux, Crushpad’s winemakers work with the client to create just the wine they want, allowing them to be as involved in the process as much (or as little) as they like: from picking the fruit, to the fermentation, all the way to the bottling and label design.
Most client’s view into their wine comes from Crushpad’s web application crushnet. In crushnet, users can watch their wine as it goes through it’s lifecycle—from vineyard updates before harvest to bottling, participate in wine making groups, order barrel sampled and allocate bottles of wine to friends.
The main goals I set for crushnet were to improve usability and path finding for users, implement the visual design provided by the designer, improve overall site performance, and refactor the code using partials, templates, and much more general CSS.
In just under a month, we re-launched the new crushnet site and saw immediate positive feedback from our users, a big decrease in page load times, and made the code much less brittle and easier to work with.
Crushnet was a Drupal/PHP based site, with MySQL and Salesforce.com DBs in the backend.
One of the other projects I was involved in for Crushpad was building out a fundraising web application. The fundraising app was a self-serve site where an organization or company could get bottled Crushpad wine wholesale, set it’s resale price and and keep the profit. During the setup process, our application would automatically create a personalized storefront for their company, walked the user through choosing or blending their wines and handled all the legal and logistic issues for transportation.
The fundraising program proved to be a big success for Crushpad, as well as the organizations raising money.