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  • From: "Alderspring" <alderspring AT salmoninternet.com>
  • To: <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] website development
  • Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 17:28:51 -0700

First, a quick introduction, since I'm a lurker! We raise grass-fed organic beef, but I'm also an avid gardener. I've learned a great deal from folks on the list, and when I saw a chance to contribute back, I thought I should.

I did our website myself--but it was quite a learning curve! I'm still learning, and just recently started a redesign (homepage is done and up, and you can see it at www.alderspring.com).

I think that it's really important to figure out what you want to do, and make your selection about hosting and design from there.

If you want an ecommerce site where you actually sell products/collect credit card info, it gets pretty pricey. We use Pair networks (which is very highly rated, but not cheap) because a good part of our business is through our website and we need a reliable host. They have a shopping cart software that is integrated that is also pretty highly rated (and again, not cheap), that is also fairly easy to use (Shopsite). We're happy with both the shopping cart and the hosting, and have been with them for about 5 years.

The other half of selling online is having people find you. I work pretty hard at keeping our website high in the search engines. A part of the ranking algorithms for most search engines (like Google) is downtime (when your site is unavailable because of problems with your host). Most hosts have some downtime--some fly-by-night hosts are notorious. Again, it is worth it to us to pay more for hosting.

If you just want a web presence to send your customers to (perhaps for news, farmers market dates, etc), then neither of these issues are too critical, and you can get by with pretty reliable hosting for less than $7 a month. If there is an occasional downtime, it probably won't deter regular customers from just checking back later, and it certainly won't lose sales. In addition, if you're not processing orders or credit card info, you don't need an integrated shopping cart.

If you're going to run an ecommerce site, and you want to be able to update it and manage it yourself, you will probably need to learn a bit about html (or xhtml-html's successor...probably). It's nice to know a bit of code to troubleshoot problems and to dress things up where needed. It really isn't that hard. You can also use a free html-editor (I used NVU and then Kompozer for our old site and they worked fined--just took some time to learn).

If I were going to have a simple web presence, however, I would probably use Wordpress, which is a free blogging software. You don't have to use it as a typical blog. It works very nicely for a website. Many hosts support it (simple to install for your site), and even if they don't, it is easy to install yourself. There are a number of tutorials, some with screenshots, floating around on the web. You can pick a new look (called a theme) from the hundreds that are freely available on the web. You can easily change the look. You can update the site very easily, format it easily, and organize each item that you post by a "tag."

Hope that helps someone!
Caryl Elzinga
Alderspring Ranch Grass Fed Organic Beef
www.alderspring.com





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