farm web design

I am currently designing an e-commerce extension to the Small Farm Central software and I'd love to hear what you want to sell online and how I can serve you with this system. I currently will  support the following sales types:

• Mail Orders: This is classic ecommerce that would allow anyone in the world to order your value-added, shippable products.
• Restaraunt sales: Each restaurant has a unique username and password to log-in to your store where you list products available during a given week. The chef can reserve and pay for the items online and then arrange a drop-off.
• CSA Share Sales: Each spring thousands of CSAs sell shares to members - allow your members to pay online directly through your farm website.
• Buying Club Sales: Your weekly customers can pick their items through an online system so they get exactly what they want instead of the classic CSA system. This one is the most unformed in my head and I am not sure exactly how it will work or what type of farm it could serve. I am talking to Neil Stauffer of the Penn's Corner Farm Alliance this week about his ideas because he wants to run a service like this in 2008.
  

Are there any other types of sales that you would like your farm to be able to make online? If you want to be involved in the design process, please make your voice heard and many of your requirements will go directly into the software.

We are using Google Checkout which will allow you to create an immediate trust with your customers that is extremely important with credit card sales over the Internet. We will never hold your bank account information or the credit card numbers of your customers - we will allow Google to do the heavy lifting (and security) in this situation. The buying process will be completely on your Small Farm Central site, but when the customer is ready to checkout they will be sent to a Google site to finish the checkout process and then a link will allow them to come back to your farm website.

We are excited to bring this new product to you and hope that there will be some input from the community. There are several existing Small Farm Central members who are driving the development so far, but there is room for more voices. Leave a comment or contact us to get involved. This service will be up and running for the Christmas rush.

Now that you picked your domain and know where you are hosting the site, you are ready for the 3rd lesson in "Farming the Web." This week you will learn the basics of how your website should look.

I believe that small farm websites should be designed with simplicity and clarity that allows the distinctness of the farm to shine through the design. Most of the design story should be told with high-quality farm photographs of which each farm should have many because all farms have a aesthetic beauty that is unique to each farm. (In short: get a digital camera today and start taking photos if you aren't already.)

Be Simple, but be Clear

I talked to one farmer a few months ago who has an old, worn out website which he freely admits is past its time. He believes that this website helps him keep a low profile and seem more down-to-earth - he doesn't want too look too polished. I understand his position, but he has a special luxury since he has enough customers for his whole crop and doesn't worry about bringing new people in to the farm. The paradox of this situation is that he is very consistent about adding new content to the website from recipes to newsletters to photos. He spends at least a morning a week producing content for his newsletter and website. This is great, but due to the layout and navigation of the website it is almost impossible to find the photos or recipes unless you are receiving his newsletter. Farm websites should be clear, easy to navigate through, and have lots of content to connect the online visitor to the farm.
The Golden Earthworm farm website succeeds with elegant and simple web design.
The best way to describe good web design is to show good web design. Golden Earthworm Farm in Jamesport, NY illustrates the idea of clean navigation and a good use of photography. One idea in web usability in continuity; how does the user know he or she is on the same site when a new page is loaded? The Golden Earthworm site is so defined by the photos in the header that when they change on each page, I have a momentary confusion if I am on a new site. The header text does stay the same on each page, but the photos are so dominant that you only see the text if you are looking for it. Define a "template" for your site and stick to it. Otherwise, Golden Earthworm does a wonderful job of providing clean navigation and content.

Activate your Design

I don't want to be rude to anyone about their design, but the best way to demonstrate bad web design is to show bad web sites. There are a lot of pitfalls along the way -- I think I have hinted at some of them already. One mistake that almost every farm website makes is that the front page is not "now-oriented." This being 2007, not 1998, the bulk of you front page should not be an introduction to who you are, where you farm is, etc. The front page of your website should show change; either what you have just added to the site lately, your farm blog, or up-coming events. This is very important: let the visitor determine his or her own way through your content -- your job as a designer is not to force what you feel is important on your visitors. You should simply make it possible for the visitor to learn exactly as much about your farm as they need to.
Coyote Hill Farm web design needs to activate the front page of their website to entice visitors.
This is a difficult concept to convey, but take a look at this site (http://www.smallfarmcentral.com). I use a blog-style opening to my site -- so on any given day the first content that each user sees is different and often completely unrelated to the core business of website software for small farms (which you can freely demo). I allow the user to come to Small Farm Central for the information that they need and I try to tease people to connect further with the core business. For example on the front page, a visitor will most likely read the title of the blog entry first after reading the title of the site "Small Farm Central". If the article piques their interest, they may read it or start to look around to see who is providing this content. In the header on the front page I have a short 3-line introduction:

"Because you are a farmer and a business person -
Because you need to connect with your customers -
We do the technology so you don't have to."

and a short heading in the left column that is titled: "Small Farm Central is..." and links to more information about the core business. I trust myself to interest the visitor with the blog and allow the user to find their way through the site and give ample opportunity for further connection. If a visitor comes to site and reads the first paragraph of the blog and clicks the back button to go to where he or she came from, I am ok with that because I connected with that person for at least 30 seconds on a deeper level than "I am a web provider to small farms" which means nothing to most people. I hope they will remember the name and come back the next time they see a link somewhere.

This is a very important aspect of modern web and navigation design, in my opinion, and it takes a paradigm shift and trust. Just remember as you are going along in your web design process: the users of your website are smart - they will learn about you as long as you make it easy to get that information. Your first job as a web designer is to get the interest of the visitors - you have about 15 seconds to do this before they click the back button. There is much more to learn about web design and specifically farm web design so I will continue to cover these topics in the next few weeks.

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Last Week: Hosting Options
Next Week: Design (Advanced): what does my customer want?

I know you spent the entire last week feverishly choosing your domain name. The next step is hosting: in the most basic terms, hosting determines how each page of your website is physically delivered to your visitors and customers. I promise that this is the last week of boring technical stuff - next week we will be working with farm web design!

Hosting is a transparent, but very important aspect of running a successful website. The decision you make during this step effects all the rest of the process and can limit you in the future if you are not careful. If I may make a farming analogy, it is akin to choosing a tractor: the type and power of tractor you choose dictates the implements you can utilize later.

There are free web hosting options, though like anything else in life you have to ask, where is the money coming from? Most, if not all, of the free web hosting options will include advertisements on the pages you serve out to your visitors. You will also likely not get your own domain name -- your URL might be: http://mymarketfarm.free-hosting-service.com. You can do a search on your favorite search engine for "free web hosting" to begin to see the options. I advise you to steer away from these services because paid, reliable hosting service is so affordable. I think any serious business that relies on free hosting is starting their web marketing on shaky ground and setting themselves up for failure.

Inexpensive, reliable hosts abound that will serve your website to visitors for $5-15/month:
UpLinkEarth
GoDaddy
LunarPages
Some services provide rudimentary design tools that you can use to easily create a basic website:
Yahoo! Small Business
HostGator's Site Studio software

For any of these packages, you may want to inquire with them about supporting any advanced features that you want to use: forums, blogs, email mailing lists, and more. Many of these hosts will offer fairly easy integration, but if you are not very tech-savvy it is good to ask how to move forward.

Visiting the world of budget web hosts is like going to the boardwalk in Atlantic City or the Strip in Vegas: there are lots of bright and flashing colors, hundreds of vendors selling the same thing, unverifiable promises, and finding someone to trust with your hard-earned money is difficult. I have had my share of difficulties with web hosts in the dedicated server market which is on the higher end. Just in case you are thinking about hosting with The Planet, don't. I wasted about a week of time and a few hundred dollars trying to get server set up with them to utterly fail with unresponsive and rude technical support. In my experience, I recommend choosing a company you trust and don't be afraid to spend a few extra dollars each month if you can get help when you are having problems.

There are many other sub-options in hosting that I haven't had time to cover in this post. If you just want a simple blog, there are companies that offer free hosting for blogs. Maybe you just want a listing of your farm; you can use LocalHarvest or the New Farm Farm Locator. None of these services will provide a full website or domain name for your farm, but they could be a good option for you.

Of course, I must mention the Small Farm Central web development software as an option. It naturally includes hosting, a domain name, email addresses and a software package that makes it easy for you to develop and update your farm website. The service starts at $20/month and has a lot of special features customized for farm websites that streamline the process of development and updates. We also provide pretty fantastic customer support, if I may say so myself!

Next week: Planting the seed: farm web design basics. If you liked this article, consider subscribing to email updates using the form in the left hand column of the site.

Choosing the right address for your website is very similar to choosing a site for your farm -- it needs to be flexible for any future changes you may make, we want to know if there were any harmful toxins used in the past, and you will be spending a lot of time there, so you better like looking at it!

First, let's talk terms: URL is the entire address of the website, for example this site's URL is: http://www.smallfarmcentral.com. The "domain name" is the part of your address that identifies you uniquely - in my case smallfarmcentral.com.

Many free website services will offer you a URL with a subdomain, such as thehoneyfarm.blogspot.com. From a business standpoint, I think this is unprofessional and I recommend against having a URL as a subdomain. From a technical standpoint, if you ever want to switch to a different web service provider you will have to change your address and tell all your visitors about a new address. Needless to say, all past bookmarks to your site will be broken. Think long term and spend a few dollars to get a solid domain name that represents your farm.

Only one person on the Internet may own each domain name, so if you have a common farm name you will need to be creative. For example, one farmer on the Small Farm Central network is Warren Farm -- when I was helping Heather Warren choose her domain name we found that thewarrenfarm.com and warrenfarm.com, so we chose warrenfarmnh.com because the fact that the farm is in New Hampshire. You will also want the domain name to be very flexible to accommodate any new areas your business may explore. For example, if you are currently a CSA farm and you call your site familyfarmcsa.com, what happens in five years when you have decided that you are only going to sell to high-end restaurants?

It is important to include strong keywords in your domain name because search engines look at domain names, among many other factors, in returning results for search queries. In Warren Farm's case, if a searcher types in "NH farms", the search engine will be more likely to return warrenfarmnh.com because she refers to "NH" in her domain name.

There are a lot of sites that allow you to search for available domain names. To start, try:
http://www.instantdomainsearch.com/
http://www.godaddy.com
http://www.uplinkearth.com

A domain name registration for one year should cost about $10, which you can complete from any of the above sites.

Now that you have chosen your strong, flexible domain name you need to think about hosting - that is, how will your information be delivered to a visitor when they type your URL in their address bar? I will cover this aspect of farm web development in the next installment of "Farming the Web".

Of course, you could just purchase a Small Farm Central membership and let me guide you through the whole process!

If you would like to receive an email when I publish the next installment of "Farming the Web", enter your email address in the "Subscribe" form in the left column of the site.

Next week - Can't get there from here: Hosting Options

I know there is a residual Luddite attitude in the small-scale agriculture community and, given the fact that so many farmers have gone into agriculture precisely to avoid the pitfalls of modern life, it is completely understandable. I am not sure how exactly to measure this effect, but in my experience looking at websites of individual farmers and the web resources for small-scale farmers, I see an industry that is not using Internet technology to it's greatest advantage.

That advantage is working together: connecting groups of people and fostering communication that leads to real world action. Here I am referring to the ways that farmers connect with each other and connect to their customers. We can do better with our websites and our connections as a group. For individual farmers I believe that web communication with customers is an imperative.

When it is January and snow covers your fields do you make sure that your customers are thinking of you and your farm? Does your customer know how much work it takes all year round to bring them that steak or watermelon? If not, how can you expect them to sign up for your CSA again, come to your farm market, or buy your meat? The supermarket is always just around the corner - how do you overcome your customer's inertia and have them shop with you (besides having a far-superior product, of course)?

Communicating online is cost-effective and time-efficient -- mailing lists, message boards, and websites. Over the next ten weeks I will release a course in farm web design to help you create and sustain a loyal customer base. Use the subscribe form in left-hand column of the site if you want to receive updates via email as they happen.

I encourage you to continue the conversation by leaving comments on this article and the ones that follow. I look forward to hearing from you!