web design

An option we haven't discussed much here at the Small Farm Central blog is having a website custom designed from the ground-up by a designer or developer. This is not the approach we take with the Small Farm Central service (though we can get a custom design done for you, if you like) simply due to the cost incurred in custom development. For some farms, the cost of this work is justifiable.


How much does it cost?

For a good designer or developer, expect to pay at least $40/hour; the most expensive designers can cost much more more than $100/hour. At an average rate of $50/hour, you should not expect to spend under $1,500 on a custom designed website. This of course depends on the features: if you want ecommerce, a mailing list manager, or a blog expect to pay more.

These are initial development costs, so you should expect to pay more for hosting, domain registration, and on-going maintenance of your site.

Questions to ask your designer

It is perhaps a bit obvious, but ask the designer to provide samples of previous work. One thing to account for is that a farm website is going to look vastly different than your average social networking or hard rock band website. You need to make sure the designer has a feel for the agrarian or you will be really disapointed in the product and will likely spend a lot of money getting it right.

I heard the story of organization that supports urban agriculture in a particular region getting a website redesign. They hired a respectable local designer that has done a lot of good work in the past. When the first draft came back to the organization, the header of the website had a large corn field as the main graphic. Of course, it is excusable for an average person to think that corn is an urban crop, it was not excusable for a designer doing work with urban agriculture organization. After a few more rounds of redesigns, it became clear that the relationship was not going to work and another design firm had to be found. This mistake lead to a few thousand dollars wasted on these capable designers who couldn't work with an agricultural look.

Make sure the designer has experience creating some of the advanced features you want on your website like websites and blogs. While these elements should not be a problem for a capable developer, it is hard to know what you will get if you have your designer "learn on the job."

Friends? Students?

I hear from a lot of farmers who had a friend, customer, or student develop their website for them. I imagine that many of these arrangements work and that I only hear from people who are dissatisfied with their website. Many new Small Farm Central members get tired of contacting their designer to make changes or having someone who isn't a complete professional in the position.

Ask for a Content Management System

A competent web designer does not want to be contacted each time you want to update your product list or add a photo to your website ... they have better things to do. A content management system allows you to login and make basic changes to your website like wording, prices, or photos. This will likely cost you extra in the short run because it is more work for the person you are hiring to design your website. In the long run, it can save you a lot of money. I hear about farms really having to measure how often they can update their website because their designer will charge a full hour rate for any changes made -- think $50 to change a misspelling or add a paragraph.

You will still have to contact your designer for more drastic changes, but most of your pages and your photo gallery should be readily accessible 24 hours a day at no cost to you.

Next week: How to Find Great Designer

Next week, I'd like to talk more about how to find the right designer. I'd also like to post links to some designers that specialize in agricultural web design. I know of some, but I am sure there are many more that I haven't heard of. Do you know any? Please post in comments if you do.

Have you ever gotten an email from a relative that you have to piece together by scrolling around the photo because it is much bigger than the screen? This is mildly disconcerting because you worry what Uncle Larry took a picture of at first and annoying because it takes so long to get the full picture.

The same problem exists on some farm websites. Photos need to be optimized for web viewing which means they need to be small enough to view on a single monitor and load quickly even on slower connections. Since photos immediately connect your customers to the production of their food, it is important to get this right.

Modern digital cameras take very high quality photos that are perfect if you are zooming into a photo or want to make prints, but in their unprocessed form they are almost unusable on a website.

The software that powers Small Farm Central automatically resizes photos to an acceptable size, but even then some farmers have problems getting the photo to the servers because there is so much unnecessary data in the file. Try resizing your photos first -- if it was taking you a few minutes to upload your photo before, after resizing your photos it should take around 10-15 seconds to get the photo to upload.

If you run Windows, a great piece of software is Picasa which allows you to resize photos in large batches. Read this help document to learn how to resize photos with Picasa. The software has a great interface and a lot of other photo editing tools, so it is definitely worth the download.

If you are on Mac, I don't have as clear of a recommendation. I found this video which explains how to use Apple Mail to resize photos. Perhaps there is a better way? Let the community know in comments.

This advice stands for any farm website you are running, whether it is Small Farm Central or not. We do take care the smaller details of creating thumbnails and sizing the photos correctly, but if you are running your own website, look to resize your full size photos to around 640 x 480 pixels.

(Photo by tanakawho)

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!

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

What kinds of people come to your website?A powerful exercise in web design is "scenario design" or "personas" -- these techniques help determine who visits your site and how you can serve them. To start, make a list of the type of people who will visit your farm website. Here are some examples to get you started on your own list:

• Farmer's Market customers
• Prospective employees
• CSA members
• Family members, friends, or neighbors
  
• The general internet population
• Local media learning about your farm
• Skeptical community members

Once you have created your list of possible visitor types, now write bullet points of particular tasks each persona may want to complete. To be really complete you could talk to a few people from each important group to see what they want from your website, but you will usually have a good general idea of what your visitors want from interacting with them in person over the years. An example list might look like this:

• CSA Members
• Contact the farm for alternate pick-up
• Choose what vegetables they will receive this week
• Read the latest newsletter
• View photos
• Find out what to expect in this week's box and for the rest of the season
• How to use that weird vegetable (what the heck is a Daikon Radish and how do I cook it?)
• Connect to other CSA members
• Other small-scale farmers
  

You may not be able to satisfy all the needs or wants of type of user depending on your commitment of time and resources to your web project, but it is an important baseline so you can select which type of visitor you serve and how they move through your site.

Now that you know what tasks need to be completed, list the features of your website and match up persona:task pairs as this simple example shows:

• Blog
• All personas: get recent information about the farm
• CSA members: connect to other CSA members (through comments)
• CSA members: read the latest newsletter
  
• Prospective employees: learn about the daily tasks on the farm
• Recipes
• CSA members: how to use that weird vegetable
• The general internet population: take information that they use in their area
• Other small-scale farmers: get recipes for their newsletters

Now you have a very structured way of prioritizing work on your website. Maybe you want to eventually list every variety of vegetable that you grow to show your customers the diversity of your farm, this is probably of lower priority than a photo gallery which connects customers to your farm in the first place. Prioritizing is especially important if you plan to do the web design work yourself because it takes an overwhelming task and makes each part a bite-size piece you can chew as time allows.

I don't have a specific set of features that I recommend for farm websites, but I believe the Small Farm Central feature set is expansive and suits the needs of most farmers. That list may be a good place for you start as you think of features that you would like on your website. We are constantly adding more! For example, at the behest of a member, we want to expand the "current products" section of the farm websites to allow farmers to add notes ("Garlic only available until Wednesday"), expiration dates, and explicitly link available varieties (we only have "Rosa Bianca" eggplant available this week).

Get started on your website this fall by starting a persona list and working up your features from there. You will probably think of visitors that you never considered before.

If you gained some insight from this installment of "Farming the Web" you may also be interested in last week's article,

Active and elegent farm web design is possible.

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