In aviation, nobody asks you to trust that the maintenance was done well. You hand over the logbook: every inspection, every part replaced, every discrepancy closed out — dated and signed. When an aircraft changes hands, the logbook is what determines its value. Forty years in that industry taught me that documentation is not overhead. It is the product.
Most winery websites run on the opposite system: trust. Somebody built the site years ago. Someone else hosts it. Backups probably happen. Updates probably run. Nobody holds a record of any of it — and the website quietly carries somewhere between half and two-thirds of the winery’s revenue.
What a logbook looks like for a website
The same discipline translates directly. A website logbook is a set of dated documents that make invisible work visible:
- An Inspection Record — a written audit of how the site gets found, gets trusted, and sells, with findings you can verify yourself.
- Restore Test Certificates — proof the backups were actually restored on a specific date, not just scheduled and hoped for.
- Care Reports — what was patched, what was blocked, what changed, month by month.
- An Ownership & Access Register — every domain, account, and license, and who controls it.
None of this is glamorous. Neither is an aircraft logbook. But when something breaks on the Saturday of release weekend — or when you eventually sell the winery and the buyer’s advisors start asking questions — the difference between having these records and not having them is the difference between an answer and a shrug.
Where to start
Start by asking whoever takes care of your website one question: “When was our backup last restored, and can I see the record?” If the answer is a document with a date on it, you are in good hands. If the answer is silence, that is worth knowing now rather than later.
PDG’s full commitment to this discipline is written down in our Standard of Care — and if you want an outside read on where your site stands today, that is what the Visibility Audit and the free visibility call are for.
