Leaf Myczack, Broadened Horizons Organic Farm.
Websites That Generate Connection
Posted October 23rd, 2008 by simon.huntley
When farmers are considering a website I often get questions centering around how much business a website will create for the farm. In other words, what is the return on the investment of time and money that goes into a website?
We can look at quantifiable data such as hits or direct sales, but often a website is beneficial in ways that defy numbers -- such as professionalism, connection to the farm, and time-savings in having information available for customers.
One quantifiable output of a site is the number of emails sent by customers or prospective customers from the contact page of the site (like ours).
Photo by tifotter.
The average actively updated Small Farm Central farmer site received 45.4 contacts in the last 6 months through the email form. Some did much better with as many as 120 contacts.
In 6 months through one aspect of the site, these farmers found 45 new customers or were more available to 45 existing customers. Make your own calculations on this figure, but almost any way you do it, even this one data point justifies the cost of getting a website set up.
I do not encourage looking at this sort of data as the only way to advocate for having a website because it is beneficial in many aspects of farm marketing. On the other hand, it is important to have hard numbers and "contacts per season" is one way to justify the expense and time required to get a website started for your farm.
Photo by tifotter.
Hi, I'm Simon Huntley, the lead developer here at 
Post new comment