Websites for farms and rural businesses.
// farms · farm shops · equine · dog fields · commoners · breed societies
// free first draft · sites from £600 · hosting £25/mo
I live on the edge of Dartmoor and a fair share of what I've built is for the businesses around it: a farmers' association selling meat boxes, a sheep-breed society taking membership renewals online, a commoners' association managing 1,671 hectares of moorland, and a dog field that takes bookings and sends the gate code by itself. Rural businesses are not brochure sites with a tractor on them; they usually need the site to do something.
That something is nearly always one of a few things: sell direct (boxes, produce, livery, lessons), take bookings (the field, the yard, the holiday barn), or run a membership. I build sites that do those jobs and then keep working with nothing to maintain, on the kind of signal you actually get in a yard. From £600 for a simple site, with most coming in around £800.
What a rural business site has to do
Sell direct where it makes sense
Meat boxes, eggs, hay, livery, lessons. A simple shop or an order form with payment, without the monthly platform fee, and without pretending you're a supermarket.
Take the booking and send the code
For a dog field, a yard, a barn or a course: bookings with payment, confirmation emails and access codes that go out automatically, so nobody is texting a gate code at 6am.
Run a membership without the paperwork
Renewals, members' areas, documents behind a login, a directory of members. Built for the volunteer secretary who inherits it, not for a developer.
Be found from the road, not just the county
"Farm shop near Ashburton", "livery yard South Hams", "dog field Ivybridge". A page for each thing and each place, with real photos of the place.
Load in a field
Rural signal is the whole reason the sites I build are as light as they are. Pages arrive as a few small files, so they open on one bar while the customer is standing in your car park.
// what one looks like
Built for businesses like yours.
Sites built for farms and rural businesses around here. Yours would start the same way: a chat, whatever you've already got, and a working draft within days.
// questions
The questions farms and rural businesses ask first.
- We are a volunteer-run association. Who looks after it when the secretary changes?
- That's the case I design for. Members' areas and renewals run on their own; content changes come to me by email; and everything lives in a versioned repository you own, so any developer could pick it up. The Greyface Dartmoor society and the Harford and Ugborough Commoners both run this way.
- Can we sell meat boxes or produce without a big shop platform?
- Yes. For a handful of products an order form with card payment is simpler and cheaper than a shop platform, and it doesn't charge you a percentage. For a proper range with stock and delivery slots, a small shop can be added; we'd settle which on the first call.
- The signal at the farm is terrible. Does that matter for the website?
- It matters for your customers, not for the site. The site is hosted on a worldwide network, so it's fast wherever the visitor is, including in your own car park on one bar. That's the point of building them this way.
Wherever you are: the towns I work in, and everywhere in between.