So, how can you tell if your farm needs a new website? Welcome to Small Farm Nation Academy where we’re gonna help you learn everything you need to know about how to market your farm or craft food business.

So I get a lot of people actually who come to me whether they’re part of Small Farm Nation Academy or whether they come to us on the agency side and ask us for a new website design.

And a lot of times, I stop and say, “Well why do you think you need a new website? Sometimes people just get frustrated and they don’t like something about their site, or their design, and they think they need to have a whole new site.

Most of the time they’re right, it’s true but not always. So how… How would you know what are the questions that you wanna answer, to know if you need a new website? Let me give you 10 things to think about.

And these are kind of a in priority order, but I guess not really, because they’re also important.

1. But number one, it has to be crystal clear on your website right away what it is you do, what’s in it for the visitor and what they should do, what action they should take right away in that top header what are you do… Or they gotta get this within a few seconds. As I’ve talked about in many videos so that’s gotta be clear.
2. Second thing is on your website, there has to be an effective opt-in when I say effective that is working. People come to your site and they see this opt-in and they give you their email dress. Now, why is it so important, because 80% of the people who visit a website are never gonna return again, why would they? The reason they come back to websites, usually it’s because they get an email bringing them back to the website. Are you on my website right now? How did you get there because you clicked on that email I sent your right, so now you’re back. So that’s how you get them back to your website. If you wanna come back, your website.
3. Reason number three is that your site isn’t responsive and doesn’t look right on all devices, particularly all mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, or whatever you have to run a lot of test on your website and view them two different devices to confirm this, but you’ve got to make sure your site looks great on our devices because more than 60% or searches now are happening on smartphones and that’s just gonna keep going up right, because most of us are using our smart phones as our computer.
4. Number four is because you have low quality, non-emotive, imagery on your farm website. This is a tough one for many of you, a lot of you love to use your own pictures and you take bad pictures or you take pictures that aren’t as Brant, as they could be. I’ve talked about this before, and my podcast and my lessons about investing and great form photography and videography. If you’re gonna use your own images, do that, otherwise you’re using stock photography wherever possible. Obviously, not when you’re talking about you, I don’t wanna say “Hey I’m Tim and put up a picture of Brad Pitt. I might like that, but it ain’t the right thing to do, but used to write images for that capture the emotional essence of what you’re talking about on that page, whether you’re talking about a product or whether you’re talking about the overview of your farm, as well. So that’s another reason why you should update your site.
5. Reason number five is because you’re not ranking well, your SEO results are poor, on Google, so you wanna make sure that you re-do your site, look at the technical aspects of co-look at the on-page aspect of… So look at the off-site aspect, but that’s not gonna change when you do your backlinks are gonna say… But SOS a reason to re-do your side.
6. Another reason is that your site loads too slowly, this is gonna be part of the Google ranking issue, it’s gonna penalize you because people abandoned website, if it takes more than three or four seconds to load, and Google will penalize you because Google prioritizes search rankings for mobile devices another reason to change the website
7. reason number seven would be that it’s difficult for you to make small changes by yourself to the website with today’s tools, and technologies, you should be able to go in and make changes to fans and colors and add images and obviously do blog posting content that kind of stuff in prices and manage your store, and all these things and you should be able to customize it the way you want to, if you can’t find a solution for that reason.
8. A Bra is your site is clearly outdated, it’s boxy. It’s one of these particular… In the farming world you have all these boxy old school website designs that just look awful.
9. Reason number nine is that the navigation or user experience is nothing like what consumers are used to seeing on other sides. Does it mean, make your site like Amazon, or like Walmart or whatever? But we’re selling to people and we’re targeting people who are used to using these typical large sites. So in terms of font in terms of readability in terms of navigation in terms of word of expect things, we would be pretty consistent with all that so that we create a pleasant experience with them when they’re on our site.
10. The last reason, number 10, is that your website currently either doesn’t define your brand, or it’s off-brand, so when you create a site, it was just to throw a side up, but maybe now you have a brand or maybe you thought more about branding. Hopefully, I’ve helped you with that and now you realize, “Well this site doesn’t really portray me as a brand if you don’t know what that means to go to a website like Apple, you know what to expect already, you think in minimal design, the way they would use their fans the way they would use pictures of their devices but there wouldn’t be a lot of content there. So think about the branding implications on your side.

So that’s a checklist of 10 reasons for you to think about when you’re trying to decide. Do you need a new website or not? If you do need a new website, get it done, don’t put it off because this is how people are gonna find you, and this is how they’re gonna interact with you.

If you’d like to learn more about web design, and anything to do with marketing, head over to Small Farm Nation Academy. We got lots of courses there for that.