Kelit Wines Italian Wine in China

Kelit Wines are Italian wine traders, based in Hong Kong and South China. Kelit were looking for a fresh new web identity with exquisite European style and sophistication to accompany their already refined style.

After extensive research into various websites for the Chinese market, as well as the internet itself in China, we started to realise the hurdles ahead. Internet speeds in China are particularly slow and due to high volumes of traffic on the restricted networks, we knew we had to build a very low energy website that still allowed maximum effect using imagery and features. Kelit had also made some requests, including a regional map that allowed wines to be selected by region, similar to the interactive map that they had on their old website, which posed questions due to the bandwidth abilities. Furthermore, they also required a dual-language feature with Chinese and English translations.

To combat the snail’s pace of internet speeds in China, we simply worked to a very strict compliance of immaculate code, all written in HTML5 with CSS3 using very little CPU energy to operate. We were also very strict with the overall size and capacity of the images used on the website, without compromising any of the quality. All of our websites detect what kind of device our users are viewing on and will display an energy appropriate version.

The language options were a big challenge for us. We were faced with the obvious initial problem of English-Chinese grammatical translation, and whether true sentence construction would convert perhaps as easily as English to Italian, or any other Roman alphabet. To tackle this problem, we altered our CMS to allow a translation to be performed and over-written or edited by the admin, ensuring a good solid ability to display information correctly. Admittedly, the translation is 90% accurate and is problematic only when it is met with imaginative English sentence structure - in short, the simpler, the better. However, we were then faced with the translation service not passing the restriction or allowed services in China, so we were forced to use Bing by Microsoft to translate in the end. 60% of the time, it works every time. My name’s Ron Burgundy, what’s your name? Only joking, we always aim for 100%. Kelit hosts events all over China so they also needed an events page, on top the 100 wines that they needed to display on the website. They currently host in Hong Kong and have a totally badass server.