Designing a quality horse farm website is important to the success of a horse farm in their online marketing. Having a good game plan on the structure of the horse farm website will help in getting visitors to the website to do just as you want them to do, go deep into your website. Going deep into a website simply means that a visitor find enough quality and useful information to want to explore more and more of your site. Have this game plan in place and structured to show the best of the horse farm is important before the website is built. With the amount of information that is out there these days on the internet, if you do not make a good first impression, you run the risk of never seeing the visitor again. We will take a look at some interesting topics to have on a horse farm website and the good and bad of some current sites out there. For the sake of not hurting any feelings, I will not mention website names or companies that built these sites if I show some of the bad qualities of a horse farm website.

Horse Farm Home Page

The home page of a horse farm website should have certain qualities that are displayed. In all pages, not matter what type of layout structure is used, there needs to be a header, main body, and footer. The header should be used to display your farm name so that a visitor is knowing what farm they are looking at. In the header you can use images or flash to display your logo. I say flash can be used, if it is used correctly. If fash is used without having an alternate image to display if the visitor does not have flash installed can lead you to not showing a logo at all.

The main body of the home page should be a short opener that lets the visitor get to know who you are and what you do. This gets a visitor comfortable with you and knows that they are at the right place. For example, if you are a Quarter Horse farm and you do not make this known to a visitor who is looking for a Morgan horse, this will cause to confusion on the part of the visitor at your site.

The footer of the home page can have a copyright and some contact information. By having some sort of contact information available on the home page will allow someone to learn how to get in touch with you right away. If someone is in a rush visiting websites, they might not have time to find out how to get in touch with you.

Some good layout tips for a home page would be that you have the whole page displayed on a screen, you have your meta headers set and that you make sure technology is used that is cross browser. In regards to the display, most people do not like having to scroll far down a page, so having the page displayed in the browser will help from annoying your visitor. If you have a good amount of information you need to add to your home page, think about using some cross browser code to hide and show content.

In regards to cross browser technology, I am talking about not having your site set up to only satisfy a certain browser type. You should always keep in mind ALL of your visitors and make sure that every person that comes to your website will see the exact same as everyone else.

When I say meta headers, this refers to your web page title, keywords, and description. Having all of these set is important to search engines and how people find your site. If you do not have a description set, a search engine will pick up the first words it can find to use as your description. This might not be the description you want for people who find you on a search engine search. Keywords will help search engines in indexing you in the correct places so that your site will come up in relevant search phrases. I see some websites built in the Arabian horse world where the sites have no keywords or description. The company says they are the leader in online marketing, yet they do not do the simple things for online marketing for their clients.

One final note on the home page, stay away from splash pages. A splash page is a page that has some sort of flash on it that is fancy and not useful. The worst of those are the ones that do not even have a link for you to skip the flash presentation. Do not let someone bother wasting your time and money building a splash page. In this day and age nobody has time watching an intro splash page.

Navigation

The navigational system for your website is VERY important. Just as we have signs on highways to lead us in the right direction, so we have a navigational menu on our website. There are various ways to implement a menu and it all depends on how your design is set up. You see above we have condensed the menu to a drop down menu that puts proper pages under proper headings. This is helpful in leading a visitor to your website in the right direction. The two most common displays of a menu is horizontal and vertical. The horizontal menu is above or right below your header. The vertical menu is on the right or left of your body content. If your page scrolls down off of the screen, it is wise to have menu links in your footer. This is optional but sometimes courtesy to your visitors.

Sub Pages

Here are some idea pages for your horse farm website. Each farm will very on their sub pages depending on their needs and what they have to offer. These are only for you to get ideas with.

Farm Information

It is important that you have a farm information page, often called “About Us”. Visitors often have a sense of needing to know who they are dealing with, especially if you are trying to sell horses online. With the farm information page, you can tell more about yourself, your farm philosphy, farm mission, farm background, and more. This is a great way to warm your visitor up to you and your horse farm.

News & Events

Horse farms love to tell people about their successes and what they have going on. A News & Events page is great for this. You can tell people about your horse show success, new foals born, etc.. You can also tell about what you have coming up in the future. Open houses, horse shows, and more can be added to this section.

Sale Horses

Having a list of your sale horses is a great way for people to see the horses you offer for sale. There are various tools you can use to get your visitors to promote your sale horses for you. Examples of this would be a Tell A Friend feature that allows a visitor to send a page of your certain sale horse to a friend by email. You could have the option of someone downloading a PDF brochure or a PDF pedigree, both having information about the horse and your contact information. Another could be a printable pedigree that when someone goes to print could have additional information on the printable page then what is on the web page. With technology any of these can be added to each sale horse page to save you on the costs of marketing possibly. Having a video available for someone to watch is also helpful. The more information available will be helpful in the pursuit of selling a horse.

Horse Page

Presenting your horses is a great way for visitors to know more about your interests, ideas, and more. This givrs you an outlet to tell visitors about your mares, stallions, show horses, broodmares, etc..

Photo Gallery

Everybody loves pictures, and most people, lots of them. Having a photo gallery that gives you the ability to add albums and as many pictures as you like in each album, right from your own computer, is fun and helpful. Pictures/Photographs can help give a visitor more information about you, lets you show off your horses and your farm, as well as anything else you want to add. Having the ability to do this at your convenience can be fun for you.

Contact Page

The web is an easy way to get your information out to people. Having a contact page will lead someone to the place to find this information. On a contact page you can have your mailing address, phone number, fax number, email address, and anything else that can be used to contact you. To help your visitor with an easy way to contact you, a form that they can fill out on your website that goes to your email is very helpful. This is for ease of use and can help you in time management, in that you can reply at your earliest convenience.  Some sites I see that are created by “Horse Marketing Companies” that only take the time to put down your regular information and do not bother to give you the online form. If someone is not able, or willing, to offer you an online form, rethink them doing the work for you. Just my opinion.

Summary

Having a well built horse farm website can work for you in many different ways. Having a badly built horse farm website can do you major harm, maybe your reputation. When working on your own, be sure that you look at your work and your farm without blinders on. Be open to your good and your bad, your positives and your negatives, your strengths and your weaknesses. If you are having someone build your website, make sure you keep these tips and ideas in mind when they offer you a proposal to build your site. There is a fine line these days between graphics and programming on the internet. They are getting closer and closer tied together day in and day out. Do not let someone build you a beautiful website that cannot perform for you. Do not let someone build you a website that can perform for you but is down right ugly.

Try to keep these ideas in mind and my best wishes to you on the success of you and your horse farm on the internet.

Rob

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Tags: equine web design, horse farm website, Web Design —