A farm website with fresh content encourages return visitors, deepens your relationship with customers, and will lead to increased sales in the long run. The problem is always time: there are struggling transplants to water, your livestock are giving birth, there’s the orchard to prune.

I have to admit missing a full week of blogging here at the Small Farm Central because there were simply other, more pressing tasks to attend to. I don’t think you need to always stick to a rigid schedule for freshening your website. That would ignore the realities of farming. If you have a commitment to communicating your vision and telling your farm story, the rest will fall into place.

The best advice I can give is: make it easy.

Even if you are committed to communicating, writing, and posting pictures throughout the summer season because you truly believe in the long term benefits, it isn’t going to happen if posting to your website is hard.

Do you need to re-learn HTML and CSS every month? What’s the FTP password again? How do I change the title of the page? These are questions you don’t want to answer deep the summer season when there are more pressing concerns in the fields.

Make a schedule, but remember that schedules are meant to be broken. I plan to post one blog entry here each week throughout the year, but I would rather post quality content that helps farmers think about their web communication and commerce rather than something inadequate that shows I just didn’t have time. Each contact must add value to your customers experience with your farm or they won’t spend the time to read that next mailing list email or come back to your site to look at farm photos.

I have already seen such an improvement in farm websites this Spring as farmers sign on to Small Farm Central. There are farmers blogging, posting photos regularly, keeping an updated calendar, and sending weekly emails to customers, and selling their goods through their website.

I hope that however you decide to solve your web communication and commerce needs, you can see the long-term benefits of honest, value-adding communication with customers. This isn’t something that will help you this month or even this season; this is for the long term health of your farm and business.