A Website For Your Farm: Why and How
3 March 2023The creation of a simple one-page website for your farm can make it much easier to promote yourself to potential employees and provide the information a potential employee may wish to know about your business. It also provides a good platform to market stock or produce to customers and consumers.
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Good quality candidates will search for more information on you, they will want to connect with you in advance of putting an application in. This is where a farm website is a very useful tool.
A website offers much greater control than a social media page as you cannot monitor or censor the comments on a social media page but you can be in complete control of what goes on your farm website.
Why a one-page website and what does that mean?
A one-page website can be created for free without you having to engage the services of a web builder or specialist hence why it is the most cost-effective option for farm businesses.
A one-page website is simple in that all the information is displayed on one page rather than having a menu where you click between various pages such as ‘About Us’, ‘The Team’ and ‘Contact Us’ like you might be used to seeing on the websites of larger companies.
Key areas to cover on your webpage
- History of the farming business
- Current size and enterprises
- Information about the current staff team and management
- Include a picture of the farm and/or staff team
- Location of the farm
- Contact details for the farm
Features or layout considerations
When creating a one-page website, you can lay the content out in the order that you wish people to view it in. When deciding on your layout, something that is logical and takes the reader through the story of your business is best.
Many people now view websites on a phone or mobile device rather than a computer. Therefore, it is important to locate your main messages early on the page before the reader needs to scroll down the page. This is often referred to as ‘placing your main messages above the fold’.
Linked to the viewing on mobile devices, allow your site visitors to easily reach the beginning of your website with a ‘back-to-top’ button rather than them having to scroll all the way back up.
It would be a good feature to embed a link to a Google maps location or map image on your webpage so that visitors can easily see where you are located and how long it would take them to travel to you. You can find instructions on how to do this using the guidance notes of the webpage provider tool you select. For example, if you were using Wix, simply type into a search engine “wix embedding google maps link”.
To improve how easily your website can be found when people are searching online, it can be useful to set up a Google Business profile. This ensures that information about your business appears when people complete an online search.
The creation or linking of a farm business profile is very similar to what retailers and shops do. If you were to search for a well- known chain shop in your local area, you would often see something very like the image on the right-hand side.
This is this shop's Google profile. Full instructions on how to set this up can be found via Google’s support pages online. The process is simple however and even if you don’t currently have a Google account, you can easily set one up to allow you to create a Google profile.
How to take action
- Create a business profile on Google
- Write a list of all the key information to include on your farm webpage
- Take or find some good quality photos to use that describe your farm and what you are all about
- Select a free software package to use (examples given in the guide)
- Use one of the templates available to start building your one-page website
Related Resources
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