Last year we were contacted by many smaller farms and folks just starting out with cornfield mazes about doing ’starter websites’, so we’ve decided to give it a try! It’s important to make a good showing "out of the gate", as they say in rodeo — a farm needs a good logo, recognizable artwork, and a strong foothold on the World Wide Web.

We have always extended the invitation for our farm clients to pay half of the web development fee up front and the rest of the fee in December (or after the crop comes in!). That’s been helpful when folks want to start out with a full website, but smaller farms don’t have the content (activities, photos, special events, etc) for a larger website. So, we have developed packages for starter farm websites … with just a few *strings attached!

A "Garden Plot" on the Internet ($945) includes: A one-page website with logo design, banner artwork (usable for flyers and ads), 6 months of webhosting on our server (includes email, web traffic tracking, spam appliance and more), and optional one-year registration of your domain name. We also add a link to a Google map to your farm.

A "Pasture" on the Internet ($1,475) includes: Logo design, banner artwork (usable for flyers and ads), 6 months of webhosting on our server (includes email, web traffic tracking, spam appliance and more), optional one-year registration of your domain name -AND- Installation of a WordPress **blog application and configuration of it with your banner artwork, basic blog setup (page/post categories), and instructions for use. We also add a link to a Google map to your farm.

*The "Strings": Sites are hosted on our server, since we are familiar with configuration details and have required elements like MySQL and PHP. Starter sites are limited to 5 email mailboxes. Sites must be contracted for prior to June 30, 2007, so we can get them done before our ‘cornfield maize crunch season’.

**A Blog site: If you missed our presentation at the National Cornfield MAiZE Conference in February 2007, then you may not know what we are doing with integrating blogs into farm websites as a Content Management System. A CMS (blog) allows the farmer to logon to his site and add pages or revise information when he needs to.

When you Meet Our Clients, check out the following farm websites that have blogs integrated: Ganyard Hill Farm, Cornbellys, Dewberry Farm, Manna Fields Farm, La Union Maze, and Hawes Farms.