Farm Website Design: Best Practices
Designing a Farm website is no simple task. While you don’t need to be a professional designer, you do need to understand the key fundamentals of a successful website if you plan to build one for your Farm.
Building a website is not necessarily an easy task for everyone. Most businesses hire a designer to build and maintain their website. However, this is not always an option given the costs of many design agencies who charge by the hour.
The purpose of your Farm website is to convey information about your Farm effectively to your customers. While it’s easy to overthink the aesthetic of your Farm website, you need to remember User Experience (UX), too, is paramount. The UX design involves how a customer interacts and navigates on your website - on a computer, tablet or mobile device. In fact, data proves that 88% of website visitors are less likely to return to a website after a poor User Experience.
Consumers need a simple and easy to navigate website (that also looks beautiful!). This blog will outline the fundamentals of Farm website design. Let’s dive in.
1. Simple is Best
Complex designs are often very beautiful, but they’re not necessarily easy to understand. Intense colors, crazy fonts, and loud graphics tires out consumers' eyes. That’s why you need to keep it simple.
Use the principle of simplicity when applying to your website.
Colors: Don’t use too many colors. Keep to a maximum of 5 colors (ideally 3), and use the color wheel when deciding on what colors pairs well together. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel (literally).
Fonts: Have one heading font and one body font. Your heading font can be intricate but it should still be legible. Your body font should not be intricate. Instead, keep it simple and stick to a serif or sans serif font. It’s common practice to have a maximum of 2-3 fonts and 2-3 sizes (header, second header, and a body font).
Photos: Use photos to attract customers and break up content, but don’t go overboard. Too much content is overwhelming. By using your photos to break up the content, you create a beautiful page! They’re great as dividers between sections.
On the same train as simplicity: make your content relevant year round. If the content is “evergreen”, you won’t need to update it throughout the year. While you might think you have time to update content, most Farmers are too busy to keep it fresh.
Listen: Google My Business: A Free Billboard for your Farm
2. Websites Should be Easy to Read
Navigating and reading your website should be easy and intuitive. It should be a pleasant journey. Your navigation should be easy to interpret and in an order that makes sense. Typically, you’ll find these navigation bars at the top of your website, linking to different pages. A common pathway is:
Home Page: Providing an overview of your Farm and website
About/Practices Page: Tell the reader about your Farm
Products Page: Go into more detail about the items you offer
Contact Page: Provide where customers can find you at markets and a signup to your email
Each page should include a “Shop” button, directing customers to your online store. This Call-to-Action (CTA) is typically in the header of your website (alongside your page directory). After all, the goal of your website is to make someone buy.
Another essential CTA is your newsletter signup. This can be in the footer of your website, to avoid distracting from the overall purpose of getting customers to shop from your Farm. However, it does hold merit as a “pop-up” given email is a powerful tool to drive revenue.
Keep paragraphs to around 3-5 sentences that are easy to read and avoid stretching too far across the screen. It’s much easier to read than a wall of text that goes across the entire screen! If you do decide to have a longer paragraph, buyers will get tired of dragging their eyes across the page to read one sentence. Note, the majority of your customers will access your website on a smartphone - so “less is better”!
Lastly, as mentioned before, use photos to break up paragraphs by white space (space that has no content or visuals). Unused space is just as good as used space. Use white space to mitigate eye fatigue and create content that users can digest and understand.
3. Your Website Should Reflect Your Brand
Before you get carried away with colors, fonts, and images, your website needs to be a reflection of your Brand. This includes your logo, colors, content and photos. It might seem like a no-brainer but it’s easy to get carried away when designing.
You will need to establish “Brand” guidelines if you haven’t already. You need to understand your brand to properly convey your message to your audience.
Read: Insights from Your Local Coffee Shop When Investing in Your Farm Brand
Knowing your Brand will help you decide on colors (will they be similar to your logo?), what to tell your customers on each page. For example, your Brand will help decide what story you want to tell on your about page. If you're focused on family, center your About section around your family history. If you desire to share high-quality food with your local community, share that information.
Lastly, make sure your logo is in the top left corner (or top middle of your page). People regularly look to the top left corner of the screen to see if they’ve navigated to the right location. Usually, it’s because they’re habits have been shaped by larger Brands. (Check out a big Brands website! You’ll find their logo in the top left corner).
Read: Logo Best Practices That'll Build Brand Loyalty For Your Farm
If you have no background in designing a website, take time to peruse other websites of Brands that you know and trust. You’ll begin to see similarities in layouts and designs that appeal to the User Experience and how the Brands convey their value proposition.
If you have designed a website, test it out with friends and family to see if it makes sense to them. Your website needs to easy to use and navigate for all your visitors.
Barn2Door is one of the largest publisher Farm websites in America, with 1000’s of sites managed by our team. If you’re curious to learn more, including building your Farm website, brand and logo, watch this 5-minute video.