This article was written by Joseph Ho of uShip.com, an online marketplace for moving companies.

Moving wine bottles can be quite a daunting task. Imagine unpacking in your new home and realizing your most prized bottle has been cracked and is leaking on your other possessions.  Read on for a step-by-step guide to prevent damage to your wine during a move.

1. Use a box with dividers. You can purchase boxes with dividers specifically designed for wine and liquor bottles from moving companies. An alternative is getting similar boxes for free from wineries, liquor stores, restaurants, or supermarkets. Stick to using smaller boxes for ease of transport. Multiple wine bottles in a box can be heavy and hard to handle, an undesirable combination for fragile items.
2. Reinforce the bottom of the box with extra tape. The last thing you want is for all the bottles in the box to fall out the bottom of the box while it is being carried.
3. Make sure the bottles are tightly corked.  A good preventive measure to avoid the loosening of corks in transport is to secure the corks using wire cork cages, especially for sparkling wines.
4. Wrap the bottles with paper or bubble wrap. Start at a corner of the paper and wrap the bottle diagonally on the sheet, folding in the excess paper on the sides as you roll the bottle. When done rolling, wrap the exterior of the bundle with shipping tape to secure the wrapping and any loose ends.
5. Place the wrapped bottles in the dividers, and fill in the empty space with packing peanuts or crumpled newspaper.
6. Seal the top of the box with a generous amount of tape.
7. Clearly label the box as fragile to prevent damage.
8. During transport, make an effort to keep the temperature of the bottles as low as possible. Many moving companies offer climate controlled moving vans.  Ideally, the wine should be kept at 55°F to prevent damage, but this may be impractical. You may want to carry more expensive bottles in an ice chest with dry ice.

There is no feeling quite like opening a nice bottle of wine after moving into your new home. By exercising caution and following these steps, you will surely transport your wine collection successfully.

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One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can.

1. 301 Redirects - With almost every customer of ours, the first thing we do is set up a redirect to or from the ‘www.’ sub-domain. If you fail to do this, the search engines may determine that you have 2 websites (http://www.grapethinking.com and http://grapethinking.com) and split your ‘google juice’ between the two of them. The fix is really simple if you have an apache server with a hosting company that provides htaccess and mod_rewrite.
2. Dynamic URLs – Which is easier to interpret? grapethinking.com/a-few-tips-for-climbing-the-search-engines OR grapethinking.com/?p=4586 It shouldn’t be that difficult to make your url structures dynamic so you have ‘pretty’ links. This will not only help your search engines, but also make it easier for your visitors to browse your site.  It is generally a good practice for your url’s to include your page title.
3. Site Map – If you want to make sure the search engines crawl all of your site, you should place a site map .xml file and point to it within the robots.txt file. The more friendly your site is to the search engine, and handing it a map the second it gets to your site is pretty nice, the more friendly the search engines will be to you. If you don’t have a site map, there are plenty of sites that will create one for you. One I recently used was XML-Sitemaps which was much simpler than downloading google’s python script, even though I am a fan of Google Webmaster Tools.
4. Dynamic META info – This topic has been beat to death across the internet, but with good reason… it IS important. Make sure you use dynamic information for creating your meta titles. If they are all the same, your just telling the search engine that every page in your site is the same, AKA: you are boring. The meta descriptions aren’t as important because the robots can generally determine the more important content of the page (see next). The meta tags, while extremely valuable about 5 years ago, are now pretty much irrelevant.
5. Content Placement – When you buy a magazine, book, or newspaper, the most relevant information is on the front cover. It’s the first thing you see. Search engines seem to think right along those same lines. The closer the information is to the top of your page the more important and relevant that content must be. If you haven’t specified meta information, and you haven’t effectively used CSS to layout your content, you may even find Google putting your navigation menu as your site’s description. You don’t necessarily have to have the relevant content displaying at the top of your page, it just needs to be first in the HTML file.
6. Your Hosting – That’s right… your hosting can play a large role in your search engine rankings. If you have shared hosting, you might be on the same server as one of those nutsos blowing viagra and cialis all over the place, or even worse, a porn site. Even though you may have a different domain name, your IP address will still be the same, and you will be punished. It’s worth the extra cash to get a designated IP. If your bootstrapping, you can always choose a hosting company that makes it tough for spammer to create accounts via call to verify or requiring one year upfront payment instead of month-to-month.
7. AJAX – Ajax is great for forms and images, but don’t try to “AJAXify” your whole site. This wonderful technology can provide great UI, but search engines are blind when it comes to javascript, and the fact that your site sits under 1 never-changing URL does not help much either.  Believe it or not, a relatively large percentage of users (~10%) have javascript disabled, and would not be able to use your AJAX heavy site.  Most large companies have JS disabled by default for protection, and a lot of users typically turn it off to speed up their browsing experience, and eliminate pop-ups(unders,overs,etc..).  JS and AJAX can greatly enhance your site, but should not be required.

So there you have it… 7 of the more common SEO mistakes made by web developers. Granted, what you do on-site is only the foundation of optimizing your site, the off-site is what really provides the most weight in search engine rankings.

Grape Thinking is a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO). If you are interested in having a professional provide you with an analysis of your site (with detailed instructions on how to fix the problem areas), request a free quote.

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Five years ago I was with my friend Danny at the Fauzi Azar Inn in Nazareth on the 11^th of September, away from our Israeli Kibbutz, and when I saw the news of the twin towers on CNN I had no idea that it would be the perpetual cause of me having to wait in long queues all over the USA, standing in my socks and being told I would have to also remove my belt and watch.

Generally if one is traveling on business it’s easier not to check baggage to expedite the whole process of disembarking and getting to wherever you’re going. What this has to do with wine you may ask is a very good question, and in actual fact it has to do with a lot of debate in the wine industry that I will touch on shortly. You see, we wine people carry a key item on us at all times and being caught without it is not an option… the corkscrew.

Since I have been in the United States I have been on countless flights and on every one I have been forced to part with my corkscrew, as it would seem that the inch-long foil cutter is a genuine threat to the air-marshal armed with a pistol on every flight. I know that I don’t suffer alone, on occasion I’ve even seen The Australian having to surrender our industry’s prized tool and she’s glanced up in my direction with a knowing look of you’re going to lose yours too.

Once on the Wines of South Africa tour in San Francisco, when all the exhibitors flew together we ended up at the convention center and all of us had had ours confiscated, resulting in hundreds of unopened wines. This is an item that you would think would be plentiful in California, but it would seem that every other store has worked on that assumption and thus everyone fails in stocking them. As a result, twenty screw-loose exhibitors were forced to purchase ostentatious stainless steel designer made Williams Sonoma corkscrews for $25 a piece and as you may have already guessed it, every single one was again routinely removed on that night’s flight to Los Angeles.

You should think that we would all learn, but to put it simply, when I’m walking down the street with a bottle opener in my back pocket, I can’t say that I feel threatening, it just kind of slips one’s mind. I dream of the room in every airport where buckets and buckets of nail scissors and corkscrews are kept, what is the government doing with them all? Where do they go? What can a company do with thousands of corkscrews and no wine? Perhaps this is the real cause of confiscating liquids on airplanes, because with all the openers, the staff finally needed something to open!

Of course, many people have found themselves proverbially screwed by being caught without an unscrewing device that should accompany the bottle of wine they so smugly packed in the picnic basket. It’s a perfectly schoolboy error to take a woman on a wine and cheese picnic with the intention of impressing her only to realize that you have no efficient means of removing the cork enclosure. Ever tried to open wine without a corkscrew, its really screwed up and bound to get messy. One guy I know speared through his hand trying using a Leatherman as a chisel and his hand as the mallet, all that for a cheap bottle of merlot! To my mind an unsuccessful date with a lot of lost blood and no wine at the end of it doesn’t really seem to be worth all the fuss.

Cheap merlot and speared palms aside, even if my friend had had a corkscrew the wine may have very well been corked. It’s all very well to send it back in a restaurant, but when you’re out watching the sun set its just frustrating. As a salesman I’ve had tradeshows almost ruined by corked bottles of wine and one has to wonder, if people don’t put up with milk (a living, breathing organic product) being sour, why is it that people in wine continue to debate the more sophisticated system that is screwcap? Some may argue that a lot of the romance is lost by not using cork. I argue back that a lot of the romance of gun battle has been lost since we stopped using raw gun powder and stuffing lead shots into the top of muskets with sticks. There’s nothing romantic about a decomposing cork or TCA no matter which way you spin it. The real magic, real cork or no, is in the bottle.

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