A complete platform migration and visual redesign for one of India's most recognised wineries — building a custom booking system, walk-in management panel, and store locator serving 27,000+ retail outlets.
Online tour purchases in month one
Leads generated May 28 – Jun 29, 2026
Organic clicks first month live
Avg position for "big banyan vineyard"
Client
John Distilleries Pvt Ltd - Big Banyan Wines
Industry
Wine / Winaery / Wine Tourism
Market
India (Karnataka, Goa, Kerala, Pondicherry, Maharashtra, Telangana, Andaman & Nicobar
Scope
Full redesign and platform migration - WordPress/WooCommerce → Next.js + Directus CMS. 30+ pages, custom booking system, admin panel, store locator.
Tech Stack
Next.js, Directus CMS, PostgreSQL, EasyPanel, Cloudflare, Razorpay, Twilio, Redis
Timeline
Aug 2025 (contract) → May 2026 (launch) — ~7 months including design exploration
Languages
UX Research, UI/UX Design, Frontend Dev, Backend Dev, Booking System, CMS Setup, SEO, Analytics, Training
Live URL
bigbanyanwines.com
Replace the outdated WordPress site with a modern, luxury wine experience featuring distinct visual identities for each of the five wine collections.
Deliver sophisticated animations, micro-interactions, parallax effects, and dynamic visual elements that reflect Big Banyan's premium positioning.
Build an integrated real-time booking system for tours, tastings, grape stomping, and events — replacing the clunky WooCommerce checkout entirely.
Store locator functionality covering 27,000+ retail outlets, plus on-page SEO to help customers find Big Banyan wines across India.
Admin dashboard with booking analytics, walk-in versus online ratios, revenue tracking, visitor demographics, and exportable reports.
Give the marketing team and front-desk staff an intuitive CMS they can operate independently — no developer dependency for day-to-day content and booking management.
Replace the outdated WordPress site with a modern, luxury wine experience featuring distinct visual identities for each of the five wine collections.
Deliver sophisticated animations, micro-interactions, parallax effects, and dynamic visual elements that reflect Big Banyan's premium positioning.
Build an integrated real-time booking system for tours, tastings, grape stomping, and events — replacing the clunky WooCommerce checkout entirely.
Store locator functionality covering 27,000+ retail outlets, plus on-page SEO to help customers find Big Banyan wines across India.
Admin dashboard with booking analytics, walk-in versus online ratios, revenue tracking, visitor demographics, and exportable reports.
Give the marketing team and front-desk staff an intuitive CMS they can operate independently — no developer dependency for day-to-day content and booking management.
Replace the outdated WordPress site with a modern, luxury wine experience featuring distinct visual identities for each of the five wine collections.
Deliver sophisticated animations, micro-interactions, parallax effects, and dynamic visual elements that reflect Big Banyan's premium positioning.
Build an integrated real-time booking system for tours, tastings, grape stomping, and events — replacing the clunky WooCommerce checkout entirely.
Store locator functionality covering 27,000+ retail outlets, plus on-page SEO to help customers find Big Banyan wines across India.
Admin dashboard with booking analytics, walk-in versus online ratios, revenue tracking, visitor demographics, and exportable reports.
Give the marketing team and front-desk staff an intuitive CMS they can operate independently — no developer dependency for day-to-day content and booking management.
Onboarding Call
The August 5, 2025 discovery call between Anand and Namratha Rao lasted over an hour. Namratha showed the live site, highlighting booking flow issues, flat collection pages lacking wine range personality, and outdated journal and contact sections. She explained "design-heavy" as animated elements, dynamic backgrounds, and hover interactions, citing Perrier Jouet and Veuve Clicquot as examples. Operational needs surfaced: walk-in tracking, weekend-only grape stomping add-on, corporate booking forms, and event listings. Anand demoed the Directus CMS backend with Pro FX training videos, showing the marketing team's content workflow. The platform choice—Next.js over Webflow—was made. Client contacts: Namratha Rao (primary), Prisha Jairath (strategic), Monisha Futnani (creative). Vendor registration, contracts, and onboarding followed, with the final contract signed October 23, 2025.
Development
Development led by Ashutosh Tiwari with Shilpa Sharma and Prayank Sharma building pages in WordPress + Elementor. No custom code; all editable via Elementor. Shilpa delivered 27 pages in batches, including Privacy Policy, FAQs, Admissions, Curriculum, Campuses, and Services. Progress tracked via shared Google Sheet with prototype and dev links, QA status, and client review. Key integrations: WP Event Manager Calendar, Google Maps, OpenApply redirect, Bunny.net for video hosting.
Tech Stack
SEO continuity on launch
Every legacy URL had to migrate unchanged, and Rank Math gave the team direct, in-admin control over meta titles, permalinks and descriptions post-launch — without needing a developer for routine SEO housekeeping.
Total self-serve
Helixr's Marketing Manager and practice directors were already writing and structuring their own content in Excel and Figma before a single page was built. A headless layer between WordPress and the front end would have added a translation step between the CMS and what the marketing team could see and edit - flexible content blocks kept that loop direct.
Scale and shape of the content
With 25+ individual team bios, dozens of case studies and insights, and a scope that grew by 60+ pages mid-project, the templates needed to be quick to instantiate and easy for a non-technical team to populate - exactly what WordPress's page/component model is built for.
Google Analytics 4
Traffic, user behaviour, and conversion event tracking
Google Search Console
Search performance monitoring, index coverage, Core Web Vitals
Microsoft Clarity
Session recordings and heatmaps for ongoing UX analysis
Hearlink Booking Widget
Embedded appointment booking system, styled to match the site
GDPR Cookie Consent
ICO-compliant cookie banner and consent management
Live Chat
Patient enquiry chat widget for pre-booking questions
[01]
A 40-page custom build at $4,600 in 8 weeks. WordPress's battle-tested ecosystem let us move fast without sacrificing quality. A comparable Next.js build would have added 4–6 weeks and significant cost — not the right trade-off for every client.
[02]
Ibrahim and Ajmal update clinic hours, staff bios, and blog posts without touching code or raising a ticket. WordPress's admin panel works from day one — no training, no dependency on Quixta for routine content changes.
[03]
Schema markup, GDPR cookie consent, live chat, Google Maps, and Hearlink booking widget — all covered by mature, maintained WordPress solutions. Building this in a headless stack would have been cost-prohibitive.
[04]
No page builder. No theme. Custom PHP templates for every page type — complete control over heading structure, schema injection, canonical tags, and Core Web Vitals. The 42% position improvement was built into the markup from day one.
[05]
Deployed on Cloudways (DigitalOcean), not shared hosting. Server-side caching, WP Rocket, WebP images. Fast, scalable, and the client controls their own hosting account — no lock-in to any proprietary infrastructure.
[06]
On go-live: full source code, admin credentials, all design files, CMS walkthrough. No retainer required to keep the site running. No per-seat licensing. No platform fee that scales with traffic. The site belongs to them — not to any vendor.
Online tour purchases via the booking system
Leads generated (generate_lead events)
Checkout initiations (begin_checkout events)
Organic search clicks GSC, 33 days
Search impressions GSC, 33 days
New users (first_visit events)
Page views GA4, 33 days
New users from organic search
Admin dashboard views (staff actively using backend)
Google Search Console data, May 28 – June 29, 2026.
Branded terms like "big banyan wines" hold position 1.00 with a 49.5% CTR. High-intent booking queries ("big banyan wine tour," "big banyan wine tasting") show CTRs above 50%, indicating the new site is capturing booking intent effectively. The non-branded query "vineyard bangalore" at position 1.84 represents the kind of discovery traffic that drives new visitors to the booking flow.
Each wine range speaks to a different audience and price point. The website must give every collection its own visual territory — color, typography, illustration style — while maintaining a cohesive brand umbrella. This is not a product grid problem. It is an editorial design problem.
The primary revenue event is not a cart checkout — it is a vineyard visit. The booking flow needs to be frictionless, mobile-optimised (78% of search traffic is mobile), and designed for impulse decisions. Three clicks from homepage to confirmed booking is the benchmark.
Indian alcohol regulations require age verification and prohibit direct online sales. The store locator is the substitute for an "Add to Cart" button — it has to be as easy to use and as prominent. Legal pages (terms, privacy, cancellation) must reflect the specific nature of winery services.
A winery website is also a booking management system, a walk-in tracker, a corporate inquiry handler, and a content platform. The admin panel is not an afterthought — the front-desk staff use it every day, and it needs to be as well-designed as the public-facing pages.
Each wine range speaks to a different audience and price point. The website must give every collection its own visual territory — color, typography, illustration style — while maintaining a cohesive brand umbrella. This is not a product grid problem. It is an editorial design problem.
The primary revenue event is not a cart checkout — it is a vineyard visit. The booking flow needs to be frictionless, mobile-optimised (78% of search traffic is mobile), and designed for impulse decisions. Three clicks from homepage to confirmed booking is the benchmark.
Indian alcohol regulations require age verification and prohibit direct online sales. The store locator is the substitute for an "Add to Cart" button — it has to be as easy to use and as prominent. Legal pages (terms, privacy, cancellation) must reflect the specific nature of winery services.
A winery website is also a booking management system, a walk-in tracker, a corporate inquiry handler, and a content platform. The admin panel is not an afterthought — the front-desk staff use it every day, and it needs to be as well-designed as the public-facing pages.
Every design decision in this project was grounded in UX research, audience analysis, and competitor benchmarking. We don't open Figma until we understand who the patient is.
Technical SEO — schema, 301 redirects, URL architecture, on-page optimisation — built into development, not added after. The site ranked within weeks because it was built to rank.
The location page template means Direct Ear Care can open a clinic in Leeds and add a ranking-ready page themselves. The digital infrastructure scales with the business.
Anand Ashok
Founder and project lead.
Client relationship, platform recommendation, proposals, strategic direction, and delivery oversight.
Sakshi
UI Designer.
Mobile responsive designs, homepage design iterations, and design QC support.
Chandana
UX/UI Lead.
UX research, wireframes, design mockups, mobile designs, animation specifications, QC documentation, and client design calls.
Gyanendra
CMS and Content.
Directus data entry for all wine collections, content updates, image uploads, and corporate brochure management.
Krishna
Frontend Developer.
Page layouts, illustration and parallax animations, speed optimisation, Directus schema, and responsiveness.
Ravi
Frontend Developer.
Store locator map, homepage and collection page animations, brand heritage mobile design, and daily build updates.
Advith Shetty
Dev Lead
Backend architecture, auth modules, booking flow backend, Twilio setup, Lottie animation coordination, and code review.
“"We really want to make this look more interesting and engaging. We want to highlight the differences between the collections and give them their own identity."”
Namratha Rao, Big Banyan Wines / John Distilleries Pvt Ltd
The custom-built system supports real-time availability with time-slot management, multi-tour booking in a single transaction, Razorpay payment processing, and automated email plus SMS confirmations via Twilio. A separate walk-in management panel lets front-desk staff log visitors and track online vs walk-in ratios.
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