5 minute read.
This article takes excerpts from our eBook, “How to Avoid a Terrible Website with No Sales.”
Forgive us in advance for some of the following photos. Please know—we only included them as examples of what not to do. Now that this is out of the way… Here are the top three mistakes we see on Farm websites.
#1 - POOR LOOK AND FEEL
Many websites lack thoughtful design and fail to follow best practices. Too often, websites have:
Too much text
Too much scrolling
Too many pages or tabs
Low quality, blurry or ‘busy’ photos
Conflicting colors or no unified color theme
Difficult to read fonts
Too many types of fonts
People spend up four hours a day online and have strong opinions and high expectations when it comes to general look and feel. Blurry or annoying images? Too many colors or fonts? Too many tabs? If your website doesn’t look good or feel nice, they will simply bounce (leave your website).
This amount of text is overwhelming, wouldn’t you agree?
KEEP IT SIMPLE
To deliver a solid look and feel, the best design choice is simple—to keep it simple. Most modern smartphones take beautiful quality pictures without any editing. If your pictures look blurry, too dark, or low quality for any reason, then take new photos! You no longer need a professional photographer to get good photos of your farm.
For your color palette, select no more than 2-3 colors that fit your Farm’s brand. Use those colors for accents like buttons. Stick to black text and a white background for everything else. Make sure the colors you choose go well with your photos.
Pick no more than 1-2 web-safe fonts and stick with it for your entire site. Make sure the font you choose looks good both in paragraphs and single words. Don’t choose any fonts that look handwritten or are hard to read.
Remember, the most important aspect of designing your Farm’s website is to be consistent. If you keep your design simple, it will go a long way in making your site beautiful (and will better showcase your products).
#2 - TOO MUCH TEXT
Eek! Another common pitfall of farm websites is too many words. As you can see in the photo above, too many words can start to make your head feel dizzy.
Your customers, and potential customers, love to learn about your farm. Information about your farm helps you build credibility as they they learn about your Farm’s history, practices, philosophy and products. However, people on the internet today are used to consuming information quickly, and simply do not have the patience to read essays of text (called long-form text). No matter how interesting your story is, or how good of a writer you are, people just won’t spend that much time reading.
It’s best use bullets to break up the text, and to trim it down whenever possible.
SKIM IT DOWN
Break up long sections of text with high quality images
Put “long form” text in a PDF and provide a download link
Use bullets or numbers to break up information to make it consumable
Give your text a haircut—be concise
A good example of breaking up text with high quality images
#3 - COMPLEX NAVIGATION
Most importantly, your Farm website must be intuitive and easy to navigate. Once customers land on your website, they need to (immediately) know where to go next. The #1 reason customers go to their Farmer’s website is to buy available products (not to fill out a form, not to send an email first, and not to call you). Customers expect to shop, add available items to a cart and pay (simple).
When there are too many navigation options, customers may give up and leave the website.
GUIDELINES FOR EASY NAVIGATION:
If you have more than six or seven navigation tabs, give us a call
Place “Shop Now” buttons strategically throughout
Include your logo on top and link it back to the homepage
Publish no more than eight pages total, including your homepage and all subpages (believe it or not, less can be more!)
Clean and simple navigation works well.
CONCLUSION
Utilize only a few colors, use high quality photos without busy backgrounds, and choose a simple font that is easy to read. Text should be useful and straightforward—not verbose!
Contact us to learn more about custom designed farm websites to streamline your customers experience, increase orders and save you time.
If you have a current website we can add a web store for your products, do a full content, navigation and design practice audit, and make your website even more effective in driving conversion (increase orders).
We love helping Farmers promote their brands—and easy ordering—online. Why? Because we know this is how your Farm can be competitive with big agriculture, and how your community can gain more access to your products.
Download the free eBook to learn more about avoiding a terrible website!