Market Farming

["Marcy" <mlynnn AT wildblue.net>]

I hadn’t weighed in earlier because I still needed to see how this was going to work out.

Last year I finally got a website set up but it took forever and I wasn’t happy with the result.

I was and still am very happy with the hosting and domain name registration. 

 

I went with http://www.hostgator.com based on price, support reviews and general company philosophy.  I looked at Small Farm Central at the time and it looked good but I too was put off by the price. HostGator had a nice selection of templates that are provided, but they don’t provide support for the templates, it’s just an added service.  So I downloaded a nice enough template and struggled for way too many hours/days/weeks to get something I still wasn’t happy with, but it did accomplish my main goal which was to be able to accept credit cards online for CSA signup.  The template size didn’t adjust for screen size. 

I tried to manipulate their template with Kompozer (freeware equivalent to Dreamweaver).  Kompozer worked fine and I had someone to help me through that and it’s a good alternative program.

This year I needed to totally change things and have been dreading it for months. 

Another farmer in our joint marketing group was setting up a sample site for the group and sent me her info to try the control panel and template from Small Farm Central and I was impressed with how well it worked, thinking this is how it should be.

Hostgator also provides access to a program called SiteBuilder  which I hadn’t used last year, so I tried the free demo and decided to tackle my website and start over with this program.  Note that SiteBuilder has a totally different set of templates from 4,500 free templates (set I used last year).

My total for the entire year, including domain name, is $134.40 or $11 per month.  It’s not a huge difference but it makes a difference for me, and there isn’t the original start-up fee that Small Farm has.  My fellow farmer likes the idea of supporting another farmer and I understand that too, but I’m just not at the point where I can justify that.  AND I’ve gotten great support when I needed it through Hostgator – had trouble with the publish settings in Kompozer last year.   But the SiteBuilder program populated all the settings that I needed AND it worked!  I just uploaded on additional picture (the first change I made since originally publishing on Friday) and it was so simple.

I spent about 3 hours Thursday night and 6 hours on Friday to build the entire site and most of that time was spent trying to figure out how the shopping cart would connect to PayPal – which I never did get to work and just loaded the PayPal buttons to the CSA page.

 

If you’re considering anything, I would highly recommend going to the Hostgator site and trying the SiteBuilder demo – free.

 

http://www.greenhornacres.com/Home.php                There are still several things I want to adjust, such as making the main banner picture stretch across the entire screen, but I needed to get it loaded because we’ve had some inquiries.

Feel free to email off-list if you have detailed questions – mlynnn AT wildblue.net

 

Marcy

SE Colo