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Subject: Market Farming

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "William McKay" <bmckay55 AT hotmail.com>
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: websites
  • Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 11:00:46 +0000



It is getting along toward the crazy season for me, so I have only been half monitoring this thread which is fascinating. I have a couple of comments from personal experience. First, using something like angelfire, though inexpensive, is also guaranteed to cause you to miss a lot of your audience. For example, if people find you through search engines, the major search engines usually do not monitor the free sites since they feel they will probably not be around all that often (and it is true: folks who use them usually either get a com address or stop maintaining the site). Second, for what it is worth, most people using the internet feel that if a business does not have a .com (or .bis or whatever) address, it is not a serious business.

When I bit the bullet and got a .com address and started taking credit cards, business increased tenfold.

It might be worth doing your own site (just get a copy of MS Front Page). My brother has a service manage a site for his farm. It is both expensive and not all that useful since they do not update as much as they should and since he is not personally involved, he does not have a feel for what should be done to improve its utility.

Secondly, if you shop around, you can find a decent web site host for a fairly reasonable price and usually you can buy a com address there for $25-30 for two years (if I remember, the actual cost for a web site is $6.00 from the source; the remainder is the profit resellers make). I use something called Netfronts which is $17/ month with a shopping cart. It must be less if you don't use a shopping cart.


Bill McKay in E. Massachusetts and www.growitalian.com Distributor of Italian Vegetable Seeds from Franchi Sementi, spa, Bergamo, Italy. Seedsmen since 1783.

How do you utilize the site?

It is mostly informational. I have info about organics, sustainable farming,
pastured poultry, info about our farm, Info about our
CSA, Farm Photos, loads of links.
>
> What changes would you make now if you could redesign it?

I would make it more commercial, add features that would allow ordering and on
line payment. Currently I use the Free Angelfire
server (which is overall a good deal) and I want to eventually change to a paid
server that will give me my own domaine and allow for
selling to happen via my web site. But I am way too cheap to pay for something
when there is a free alternative.
>

Lucy Goodman
Boulder Belt Organics
http://www.angelfire.com/oh2/boulderbeltcsa
New Paris, OH
Looking For Local Food? Check Out
http://www.localharvest.org











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