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market-farming - RE: farm website survey

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  • From: "Rick Williams" <mrfarm AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: RE: farm website survey
  • Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 20:15:49 -0600


Liz Pike wrote:
> How long has your site been online?

About 2 1/2 years

> Can you attribute new customers directly to the site?

We have had a few, but not enough to warrant having a site for that purpose.
Of more importance is having our farm listed on the key grass-fed meat site
and that is where we seem to have gotten more of our contacts. Either
through e-mail request or actual visitors who made a list of potential farms
to stop by when they were in the driftless area. They mostly seem to find us
the same way.

We are also on other sites as well, but I don't see any traffic for now
coming our way. Particularly from Local Harvest which helps anyone in the
U.S. find local farms in any geographic area.

> How do you utilize the site?

Because of what I perceive as a changing perception of what makes for a
legitimate business, the internet site is a way of making a statement that
we are a real business and we have a web site to "prove it." I know that I
expect any mail order business to certainly have a web site these days or I
don't consider them a legitimate business anymore. That was not true 5
years ago. But even other businesses I tend to feel that they are a sincere
operation if they have a web site. I am not sure if others feel that way.

It is also a marketing tool to have the domain name the same as our farm
name. Anything we can do to create a sort of "brand" identification in the
buyers mind. It is really quite enjoyable to have people identify us by farm
name. And now with our new farm sign, we have really arrived:) Even though
we get very, very, few on farm stops, it is surprising to us how many local
people know where we are located.

> What changes would you make now if you could redesign it?

Because the site is also a learning experience that I wanted, I originally
used a canned template in MS Publisher to build the site. I received very
positive comments from others asking how we built the site because it looked
so good.

But after a few months it became real obvious that you can not make changes
the way you might prefer with that kind of code. Eventually, I went ahead
and bought MS FrontPage and started over from scratch. Even though it is
fairly crude, I am learning a little bit here and there and want to be able
to make changes as I desire so put everything into invisible tables and
found that to be the way many professionals do it. But of course we have a
long way to go to make it look high end:) It sometimes is tempting to buy
one of Thomas Brunt's OutFront themes though:)

Sincerely,

Rick Williams
Misty Ridge Farm
Dairy heifers and dairy beef graziers
Viroqua, WI

www.mistyridgefarm.com





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