Features

Each Small Farm Central service comes with its own domain name (ie. www.yourfarm.com) of your choosing. This domain name is owned by you, so if you ever decide to build your own website you can use the same address.

Each domain name comes with an email service so that you can set up your own email address; for example info@yourfarm.com. You can even set up multiple email addresses to separate the communication for different parts of your farm or to give each staff member an email address.

The internet is a visual medium and photographs of farm life are one of the most important parts of a successful farm website. Small Farm Central makes managing your own web photo gallery easy by allowing you to upload photos from the control panel. Your photos are also automatically resized to be acceptable for all connection speeds.

You can use your news/blog to tell visitors about up-coming events or specials or ruminate on your experience as a farmer. By integrating this into your administrator control panel, you can keep your site fresh throughout the year, even if you only have ten minutes to type before heading out to the fields.

Introduce your visitors to the face behind the food by displaying a photo coupled with a short text profile. The control panel allows you to easily add and delete staff members as you go along, so you can even add your summer interns and helpers to your webpage to make them understand how they are an integral part of the farm.

Visitors will want to know how they can get involved, so the event calendar allows you to easily manage your events throughout the year from on-farm gatherings to weekly farmer’s markets.

Build a mailing list by allowing visitors to submit their email addresses through your site. In your control panel, you can use a built-in function to send an email to the group. This is a great way to market to customers because each email is free of charge and you can connect to your base out-of-season, if necessary. Email addresses can be imported and exported from the database with ease.

Keep track of page views in a variety of different ways. Use this to track your website’s growth and identify trends as you build a visitor base for your site.

Create and manage surveys so that your customers can give you feedback on anything you have questions about. Surveys are automatically emailed to you when they are filled out on your website.

Sustainability NOW is a regularly updated feed that is placed on all Small Farm Central network sites. It highlights issues and stories that are of interest to your visitors. The sustainability feed may contain book reviews, links to other important websites, photographs, farm profiles, or anything else related to the field of small-scale agriculture. This feed is a hands-off way for your website to be updated regularly – it will keep visitors coming back to your website for content that you do not have to create.

Write or edit HTML pages with Microsoft Word-like ease. These pages are for extra information that does not fit into any of the other categories presented on your site. You can use it to display directions, employment opportunities, CSA sign-up information, or anything else you can think of. There is no limit to the number of farmer-defined pages you can create.

One thing that is special about small farms is how genetic diversity is maintained through growing heirloom or other specialty varieties. These are varieties that customers can almost never find in stores, so it is an advantage small farms have over the big guys. The variety manager allows you to tell your customers about the wonderful culinary, cultural, and botanical aspects of the specialty varieties you grow. This is a system wide manager, so if someone across the country has already written an abstract of 'Armenian Cucumber' you can add that description to your website with the click of the mouse. You can also add a photo to each description as well.

Maintain a list of currently available products to tell customers what they can buy through your farm. This function is directly connected with recipes and varieties, so customers can easily find all the information they need about your products.

Post and categorize recipes for the products that you sell. This is a system-wide manager, which means that all farms share the recipe database. You can look through the list of recipes farmers from all over the country have posted to their websites, and you can add them to your website with a click of the mouse.

RSS, a popular new technology sometimes referred to as live bookmarking, allows visitors to preview new content on your website without actually visiting. Each Small Farm Central site has an RSS feed connected with it, which encourages visitors to come back when they see new content being posted.

Each farmer receives a weekly email that gives you statistics about your website and encourages you to keep your site fresh.

Write and manage a short description of your farm.

Allow visitors to send you email without having your email ‘in the clear’ where spammers can pick it up. You also have the option of displaying your farm address linked to a google map, so visitors can easily get directions to the farm.

With the Small Farm Central CSA system, each member of your CSA gets a unique password and email address to log-in to your site. This is a feature that CSA members love because it creates a feeling of exclusivity for those people who support your farm in such an integral way.

Once logged in, members can post and reply to messages on a CSA forum – this is a place for your members to create a community of their own. Maybe they trade ideas for crops that they would like to see in the future or they give each other recipes for daikon radish.

Each member is given the option of creating a profile for themselves by uploading a photograph and answering a few questions that you can define in your control panel. In addition, each member can view other member’s profiles, which is a way for members to get to know each other so they can say hi next time they see each other at a pickup.

You have the option of updating the weekly share during each week of the CSA season. An email notice will be sent out to each member when you update the share, so they know to come to the website and look at the week’s share!

Manage your CSA pickups by allowing members to switch between pickup days and locations. The members can switch themselves in the CSA Member Area, or you can switch their days for them in the control panel for those members who do not have internet access. You can limit the number of times they switch during the season. When each pickup day comes, just log in to your control panel and print out a list of all the members who are scheduled to pick up on a particular day.

You can send an email to your whole CSA list or limit it to one particular pickup day.

You can update a notes section for each member which will allow you to remember certain things about each member (who wanted an extra bunch of Basil next week?). These notes are displayed when you print out your pickup lists for each week.