Farm web site for your farm

[YoungSproutFarms]

Hello and Good Morning,
I am a strong believer in a web site to promote your Farm and help with the sale of your young bulls and heifers, also if you are direct sales of highland meat. I "shopped" my heifers by researching other breeders web sites and from pictures could tell if they had stock I was interested in. I kept going back over and over looking at these pictures of young heifers until I sold myself on them. In this modern day, you can get a "free", no ad web site. At a low cost you can buy a web address / domain name.

My web site is www.YoungSproutFarms.com

In building a web site, think about what pages you may need - a home page, pictures of my herd, heifers for sale, about your farm and anything else you think a person might be interested in. Pictures should be your best, as they will show quality of your stock and promote the sale of your heifers. Lots of pictures are great for web sites, but be sure to use YOUR pictures, using other farm pictures from other sites defeats your purpose and maybe copyrighted.

I built my site using "Microsoft Live" and I am very pleased with it. Easy to get started, easy to load pictures that are automatically converted to "web ready". I built mine in a couple of hours. If you go to my site, scroll down to the bottom right hand corner and see the Microsoft live link. I love the fact that there are no ads, so many "free" web site have distracting ads that flash or have pop-up ads, this site does not.

I used "www.NameSecure.com", but most domain sellers are OK. Be sure YOU own the name and not the domain seller. Cost is about 8 to 10 dollars a year, but when you get it, buy 5 to 10 years worth. Worst thing is to spend real money promoting your site with pamphlets and hard copy advertising, only to lose your domain name from lack of renewing name. Nowadays there are companies that buy dropped names, in the hopes they can resell them to you for big money.   

I wrote this to be helpful to others wanting a low-cost web site and am not promoting these companies, other than recommending their services as a satisfied customer.

[Coble_Highland_Ranch]

Hello Young Sprout Farms,
This is Blake at the Coble Highland Ranch and i just wanted to comment on what you said about building websites.  This is a great source to use to build them and i have heard of a few people using to build really nice looking websites.  We build websites on the side while me and my wife are in school and if somebody didn't want to have to worry about learning a new type of software (Microsoft Live) than they could check out my website at www.coblehighlandranch.com Its not terribly hard to build a website by yourself, but for some people, using a service like FileZilla to FTP files to the internet can become complicated.  I appreciate you informing people about Microsoft Live because i see more and more people wanting to get their website online and don't really know how to get started.  If people have questions about Microsoft Live or having the Coble Highland Ranch to design their website for them, you can call me at 9186521411 or email me at coblehighlandranch@yahoo.com  .  Again thank you to the Young Sprout Farm for getting the word out about websites.  To go straight to our website prices please visit www.coblehighlandranch.com/website.html

[YoungSproutFarms]

Acually "Microsoft Live" is a very easy step by step with no need to have any computer knowledge at all. My 80 year old Mother could do it it is so easy.

Years ago, when I needed a good web site for my business, I could not afford to hire someone to do it. So I spent two months learning computer programing and ended up building a great web site that I spent many hours building + all the cost involved renting web space on a server. When I decided I needed a site for my farm, I did not want to spend the time or money on it I did for my business, I researched free sites and came across the "Microsoft Live" site and decided to try it. I found it so easy to update new pictures or new pages on the site, I was just thoroughly impressed.

Now I do not want to take away from a professionally built site, some of them are awesome. Professionals put a lot of time and thought into building your site and they are worth the money they earn. But I have seen a lot of bad sites that are considered "free" and the visiter is bombarded with pop-up ads or they have annoying flashing ads. This is why I wanted to spread the word about this excellent free web building site.

I would recommend to keep the site fairly simple. I have come across some sites that use some sort of slide show on their main home page that I have had trouble viewing. I use one of these new IPads that do not allow flash programs to work. So I had to go to a real computer to view the cow pictures. But pictures should download on to your web page fairly quickly on "dial-up" as a lot of people are still using phone lines to get online.
Anyway, I hope this helps some people get their farm online. You are missing sales if you are not putting your "For Sale" heifer pictures out there for me to see. My wife says I am looking at "Cow Porn"  HAha
If you want to look at a lot of Highland pictures, I did a search on Flickr.com, this is the link. Enjoy.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=highland+cattle

Glenn Young
Young Sprout Farms
www.YoungSproutFarms.com

[Coble_Highland_Ranch]

I have to admit that you are right...I think that it is pretty easy, except my grandmother and my father would still probably have a hard time with it.  This would probably be good for a lot of people who have a little computer knowledge.  My grandmother has a hard time getting her mail and it opens to a logged in yahoo page. haha. Just saying, there are people out there that either don't want to mess with it, or just really can't figure out the things that we think is easy, like uploading photos.  I am really happy with what Microsoft is doing with this program as this is the field that i am in(BS in computer security and forensics).  I feel like for most computer literate people it would build them a pretty decent looking website, like you said, without spending as much money, nor the time in learning computer code.  Trust me when i say that i really appreciate this, because i build websites for ranches online but the $200 i charge doesn't scratch the surface of the time i put into building one.  I would challenge people to go out and research it and see if they can get it to work, because if you are on this blog you could probably get a website up.  I do websites just to keep my skills up and to learn new little ways of doing things each time i build the different websites.  That is why i only build websites for Highland Ranches! I really enjoy building websites for the different ranches and it is something that me and my wife can do in our free time to help promote the highland breed.

[KevinC]

Time to input my one pet peave on websites:  Please do NOT play music.  Its cute when I'm at home, its embarassing when I'm browsing from work...

Cheers, and thanks for the posts!

Kevin

[LTLivestock]

Sorry   I do have a song my son wrote and preformed for and about my dad on our website it should not embarass you at the work place though. It is titled, "Just Like Him" . My website is LTLivestock.com We used to raise Angus cattle in Wyoming, moved to Missouri where my sons performed in Branson for a few seasons,  we bought and sold a farm, and have rebought the farm where we will be relocating soon. We only have a few bd southdown sheep and on little pig and our wonderful Aussies right now, but hope to start getting our cattle and more sheep in the near future.

[KevinC]

So the problem with music on websites isn't the quality, its that it makes it very apparently to everyone around that you are browsing non-work websites. 

[YoungSproutFarms]

http://king.wsu.edu/foodandfarms/documents/internetMrkt.pdf

Link to PDF: Internet Marketing for Farmers

[YoungSproutFarms]

Update - in above post I had recommended "Microsoft Live" free web site for your farm. Well, it is not free anymore. They re wanting to charge $75 per year now. So I have now moved my web site.

www.Weebly.com is another hosting service that offers "Free Basic" web sites that fit our needs. Using their web building program is very easy, it automatically saves your work as you are building it. Easy to resize photos, etc. just give yourself some time to figure out how it works, play with it. You can work on it, playing on it, then when you are ready "Publish" it.

You can use their sub-domain (YoungSproutFarms.Weebly.com) and if you get your own domain name, ("YoungSproutFarms.com), your domain services can "Forward your URL" to point toward your site and get your readers to your new site. My domain name service "NameSecure.com" also uses a "Gripper" they call it, so your domain name stays in the address bar after it is forwarded.

Feel free to email me questions you may have. It is very easy to have your own farm web site, to share what you are doing on your farm, showing potential customers your stock & what you have for sale. If you buy a web domain name, be sure to register it for many years (like maybe 9 years) this way you do not have to worry about losing your name. Cost for a domain name is about $14 a year or less (some companies charge about $45 a year for the same thing, so shop around) if you only do 1 or 2 years, you might forget to re-new ..... Re-enstating a lost name can cost a $100 fee and if a scalper buys it, they will try to sell it for what they can. At this point it is easier and cheaper to just use a different domain name combination for your farm. So buy more years!