Keeping your farm website fresh

A farm website with fresh content encourages return visitors, deepens your relationship with customers, and will lead to increased sales in the long run. The problem is always time: there are struggling transplants to water, your livestock are giving birth, there’s the orchard to prune.

I have to admit missing a full week of blogging here at the Small Farm Central because there were simply other, more pressing tasks to attend to. I don’t think you need to always stick to a rigid schedule for freshening your website. That would ignore the realities of farming. If you have a commitment to communicating your vision and telling your farm story, the rest will fall into place.

The best advice I can give is: make it easy.

Even if you are committed to communicating, writing, and posting pictures throughout the summer season because you truly believe in the long term benefits, it isn’t going to happen if posting to your website is hard.

Do you need to re-learn HTML and CSS every month? What’s the FTP password again? How do I change the title of the page? These are questions you don’t want to answer deep the summer season when there are more pressing concerns in the fields.

Make a schedule, but remember that schedules are meant to be broken. I plan to post one blog entry here each week throughout the year, but I would rather post quality content that helps farmers think about their web communication and commerce rather than something inadequate that shows I just didn’t have time. Each contact must add value to your customers experience with your farm or they won’t spend the time to read that next mailing list email or come back to your site to look at farm photos.

I have already seen such an improvement in farm websites this Spring as farmers sign on to Small Farm Central. There are farmers blogging, posting photos regularly, keeping an updated calendar, and sending weekly emails to customers, and selling their goods through their website.

I hope that however you decide to solve your web communication and commerce needs, you can see the long-term benefits of honest, value-adding communication with customers. This isn’t something that will help you this month or even this season; this is for the long term health of your farm and business.

Attracting eyes with clever, targeted farm advertisements

Most of Small Farm Central's farmers are focused on their local communities for sales, but some are looking outside of their locality for sales of shipped products. This is a challenging, but potentially rewarding market.

This morning, I was viewing my personal email on Gmail and I saw the following advertisement at the top of my screen and couldn't help but click on it.

I couldn't resist clicking on it to find out about the "Fruit and Veggie Guru"! This is an example of a perfectly executed text ad. I like strawberries! I know they are red and tasty...but I am sure I can learn more, so I clicked. And look, now I am writing a blog entry about the site.

The key in these ads is creating interest and excitement -- with the limited space of about 100 characters that is no small feat.

This advertisement is part of Google's Adwords program which allows you place small text ads in the search results of Google pages, affiliates, and in this case, Google mail. This can be a very inexpensive way of advertising your goods or services because you pay by the click and you can set a budget.

Perhaps you want to spend $100 per month or $5 per day, you can tell Google your exact budget. Maybe you only want to pay 20 cents per click or maybe you can pay up to a dollar -- just tell Google what you are willing to spend and they will show your ad on related searches only.

Google Adwords may even be viable for a locally based business because you can geo-target the ads to a specific region.

This a very large subject and it would take many more blog entries to explain fully; there are whole blogs devoted to the subject. I am not sure how many farmers out there are interested in this subject.

Do you want to learn more about the Google Adwords system?

Progressive Farmer features Small Farm Central

An article entitled Your Place on the Web in the March 2008 issue of Progressive Farmer features the services of Small Farm Central.

Some highlights:

If this sounds like a lot of work, another option is to go with a full-service firm like Farm Web Design or Small Farm Central that will create, design and maintain your web site for you. Prices vary: For a basic web site from Farm Web Design, expect to pay around $1,195 for a domain, hosting and maintenance for a year, plus a custom-designed web site, including content specially written for you based on a survey of what you'd like your web site to accomplish.

Small Farm Central operates differently—instead of getting a from-scratch web site designed only for your farm, you choose from three templates, which can all be customized to fit your specifications for content, colors, images and more.

For $20 per month, payable in six- or 12-month increments, you get a web site (domain, hosting, customizable design) and an easy-to-use content management system that allows you to update a photo gallery, current products, surveys and even a blog.

And some good general advice (mostly taken from this blog):

Web Site Essentials

Now that you're interested in a web site, here's what your basic site should include:

1. Contact information and directions. Nothing will frustrate visitors to your site more than not being able to easily locate your contact information. If possible, include your phone number and e-mail address on each page of your site. (And make sure you check the e-mail address at least once a week.)

2. Photography. "Photos are the first thing that people look at when they look at a farm web site," says Simon Huntley, lead designer of Small Farm Central. "Get a nice, cheap digital camera—you can get one for $100. Take photos, upload them and just make it a habit. Not only is it good for marketing, but it's good for the farmers to get a look over the years."

3. Navigation. Make sure your site is easy to navigate, from page to page, and that you can return to the home page easily from anywhere on your site.

4. Your specialties. Make sure your web site includes your seasonal hours, what you're growing, when you'll be harvesting, etc. An "About Us" page is also a great way to highlight the things that you're passionate about and tell your visitors what you do well.

Go read to whole article!

Like weeding on the farm, testing is a necessary but unglamorous task in website development

It is not a convenient truth, but your web site looks different on every monitor, browser, and operating system combination.

When I first released Small Farm Central, I sent out an announcement to the mailing list, was listed on the ATTRA weekly newsletter, and had a news segment in the New Farm magazine, so I was getting decent traffic to the site. I started hearing complaints that the navigation was impossible to use on certain pages and other fairly major problems.

The site looked fine in the browsers I was testing in – Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE). When I finally got to the bottom of the problem, I realized I had the newest version of Internet Explorer installed and the site was badly flawed if viewed under the previous version of IE.

As a web developer, I knew that I should be testing in multiple browsers and configurations, but I allowed myself to make the mistake that if it looked good in one version of Internet Explorer it must look fine in the other versions. Wishful thinking.

It is a tough lesson to truly learn until you have a serious problem like I had when I put the first incarnation of the Small Farm Central site live.

When you use a service like Small Farm Central to develop your website 95% of the necessary testing is completed before you start working with your site, but it is still important to look at your site in different browsers to make sure there are no problems.

It is most important to test your site on as many different browsers as possible. The following image from Wikipedia shows the general distribution of browsers.

Internet Explorer (IE) users are the majority and they are about evenly split between version 6 and version 7, so it is important to test in both versions. Among web developers and web designers IE is known to be the most pernicious of browsers, so be skeptical and test in both versions. To find out what version you are using, click the help menu and then click "About" when you are in the IE browser. Find a friend with the version that you don't have because it is very difficult to have both installed on your computer at once. The services listed later in this article also help you with this.

Arugula’s Star Farm had an issue like this last week because they developed their site using Firefox and as soon as their farm was getting publicity in the local paper they noticed seemingly random fonts and text sizes in different parts of their site. We were able to fix these problems easily when the control panel was opened in Internet Explorer.

If you do not have one of the major browsers installed, you can use one the services below to view you website in multiple operating system and browser configurations. All you have to do is type in the address of your website and it will do all the work for you.
http://browsershots.org/
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

As a person who makes a living with web development, browser testing and the inconsistencies that cause these problems is one of the most frustrating and necessary parts of my work. Testing is never the flashy part of this work, but following up on these details is the difference between having an amateur site and a professional site that brings customers to your farm.

Photo via cyancey