Around 95% of farming and agribusiness websites are badly designed (and that’s a conservative estimate).
In this guide, I want to show you some of the most common web design mistakes made by agricultural businesses.
And I want to provide you with tips so you can avoid having a poorly designed website.
Consider it a tutorial on how to build a website for a farming business: a website which is designed to sell and help you pay your bills.
(I’m available for web design consulting. Click here if you would like talk to me about a website.)
Here are some key points to consider:
- You can use this article as a checklist.
- Follow this guide and your website will be in the minority which gets their design right.
- And, I’ll reveal the biggest mistake most professional web design companies make when building sites for rural businesses.
What does a Well-Designed Farming & Agribusiness Website Do?
In the book Making Websites Win, Dr. Karl Blanks & Ben Jesson asked thousands of website users: “what stopped you buying from the website you are on?” Most replied: “the website was confusing.”
If you confuse your website visitors, they’ll leave your site, and maybe end up on a competitors site.
The late great copywriter John Caples said something similar:
“Remember that the reader’s attention is yours for only a single instant. They will not use up their valuable time trying to figure out what you mean.”
How does this affect website design? It’s simple…
Many web templates, web design agencies and web designers prioritise good looks over being clear.
Often, good-looking sites are built to show off a designer’s cleverness; clarity and usability are an afterthought. They cripple the site’s ability to sell to prioritise beauty.
But, unless you are a super model, beauty doesn’t pay the bills or put a roof over your head.
What are the most important part of website design?
Content is the most important part of website design.
Website content needs to be easy to read and easy to navigate.
When designing a site, your priority should be to make your content as accessible as possible. All your design decisions should make it easy for visitors to understand your website content.
If your content is poor, then it doesn’t matter how nice your website looks, it won’t do what it needs to do.
Bad content confuses people. It won’t communicate with your reader, and you’ll lose customers.
And pretty websites often have the worst content on the Internet.
What elements of web design make content more accessible?
Let’s now consider two important things that’ll make your website content easy to understand.
A bonus: If you do the first thing right it’s often beneficial for the second.
The second thing helps you to find new customers who are NOT on your website.
The first important thing is to make your website easy to read and easy to use. In a minute I’ll explain how you can do this.
The second thing is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). What most web design companies won’t tell you is that good content produces good SEO.
Agricultural business website design mistakes
The following is a list of the common agri-business web design mistakes I see.
You might wonder what makes a ‘design mistake’. I consider it to be anything which makes your website difficult to use.
In this guide I mention website speed quite a lot. Speed is essential if most of your customers live in rural locations. Because numerous folks living in the countryside don’t have the luxury of fast Internet; many still rely on dial up connections. If a website is slow to use, it’s difficult to use.
Poor image practices
All websites have their own specific requirements when it comes to displaying images. If you want your images to look good, whilst maintaining a fast website, you will need to resize them.
If you do not resize your images, you will slow down your website. Many agricultural websites could shave a few seconds off their load times if they optimised their images this way.
Moving on…
Follow these rules when adding images to a web page:
- Crop and resize your images’ dimensions to suit its position on the page. Try to use the smallest sizes possible.
- Avoid using too many images.
- Use the correct image file format which promotes the smallest files size.
- And, avoid or minimise video-graphics like GIFs.
Incorrect image sizes
When selecting images for your website, try to use the biggest and sharpest images you can find or buy. Because, you’ll get better results when you crop and resize your pictures.
Enormous website images will choke a slow Internet connection; grinding it to a halt.
If you’re lucky, your content management system may automatically crop and optimise your images. But you will have to check this.
If it doesn’t, you must: crop, resize and optimise your images before placing them on your website – this’ll help you maintain your website speed.
If your webpage takes more than four seconds to load, you can forget about your visitor sticking around to read your web page.
If you enlarge small images, they will look pixilated, blocky and blurry. They will also make your website look amateurish, old and ugly.
Too many images
Using too many images can slow a web page to a crawl, especially many large unoptimised images.
Every image you add to a page is another element the server must load. The more images you have on a page the more work the server and your visitor’s device must do.
So minimise your use of images. And use images relevant to your business. Fewer images mean your page will load faster, and that’s better for your website users.
Image sliders
Many modern web designs use image sliders. But sliders, if they aren’t configured correctly, can slow the page their on. Also, big image sliders are often ineffective as they’re usually ignored.
You see, when a site user views a slider, their PC or phone has to load every image – not just the image in view. If you have ten high definition pictures in your slider, your user’s device will have to download them all. Again, this will consume your viewers’ bandwidth, and this can grind a poor Internet connection to a standstill.
Many web users ignore sliders anyway. The first thing most visitors do when they visit a site is to scroll down. At best, they’ll see your first image and maybe your second.
Try to use a single image instead of a slider as your pages will load much faster.
If you must use a slider keep it small. If you’re wondering how big your image slider should be, and how many images it should contain, look at any big E-commerce giant. Amazon uses sliders on their homepage, but they limit their images to three small slides.
Amazon has some of the brightest minds in the world developing their site. And it’s hosted using some of the best technology in the world. For a company of Amazons size, it’s a trivial task to make a slider load fast. So ebb on the side of caution when copying what Amazon does. Because most mortals don’t have their level of resources.
Use the correct image format
Most websites will use the following image file formats: JPG, PNG, GIF.
If you convert the same image into a JPG, PNG and a GIF, the JPG would be the smallest file. JPGs accomplish their smaller size by omitting information which the eye can’t see.
PNGs can support transparent backgrounds. PNGs are sharper and a better choice for websites where photography is important. But, when asked, most people cannot see the difference between JPGs and PNGs.
GIFs are the largest of the three files I just mentioned in this guide. They are usually used to display low-resolution videos on a web page. The GIF file format is often used for animated Internet memes that you will have seen on social media sites.
Many web site themes, web builders and professionally designed sites will often fill their designs with high-resolution PNG images, videos and GIFs. PNGs can make a design look sharp, crisp and impressive. It’s an easy way to wow customers. But when designing websites for farming business, it’s the wrong approach.
If your website has rural customers, try to use JPGs, they’ll improve your page speed. A JPG image might not look as crisp as a PNG, but often this difference is small, and often only noticeable on high definition displays.
Remember: many countryside users WON’T have unlimited data. Many rural Internet users will have tightly controlled data limits. Once they go over this limit they’ll incur a penalty. Your large images and videos will consume more of their limited data, and they might not appreciate this.
Using GIFS
Videos and GIFs are worse than PNGs for increasing page speed. GIF’s are large files when compared with PNGs and JPGs. Often, a single GIF video is bigger than an image slider full of PNGs.
Many modern web designs use GIFs as backgrounds. GIFs will make a web page slower. And, often, it’s difficult reading any text which is placed over the GIF because the background moves. A moving background will blend into parts of the overlaid text – the movement also distracts the eye – making it hard to read.
If you must use GIFs, make the video span a few second at most. And try to give any overlaid text a background so it’s easy to read. But, by far, the fastest option is to use a single JPG image instead.
Using video
Allowing GIFs to auto-play when a visitor hits a web page is okay, but allowing videos with sound to auto-play is bad for the user.
Modern web browsers, like Google Chrome, mute auto-playing videos anyway. Besides, landing on a page and being confronted by a loud video is irritating; it’ll put many visitors off and make your site look like a cheap infomercial.
If you want to use video on a webpage, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo. And, embed it in a container that allows the user to control the video.
Videos served from YouTube or Vimeo will load much faster than videos served from your web server. Also, YouTube or Vimeo has the advantage of being able to detect your viewer’s Internet speed, and they can alter the video quality to suit those with slower connections.
When used right, video is a very effective marketing tool. But don’t force everyone to see and hear your vids. Give the user the choice over the video’s playback. Doing so provides a better website experience.
Moving on…
Bad Content and lack of content
Poorly written content is another way to lose customers. Your content needs to make sense. Don’t just rehash content that’s available elsewhere because this shows content for your reader.
Writing online scares many businesses. Many are scared because they fear they will sound stupid. This results in businesses filling their pages with big words and buzzwords (hoping it’ll make them sound clever). They’ll use business gibberish like: blue-sky thinking, synergise and other bullshit terms.
Please don’t write this sort of twaddle: it makes you sound pompous, it sounds as though you’re trying to hide something, and it confuses people.
Use simple words that everyone can understand. And use short sentences. It’ll help to make your text easy to read.
Long sentences and big words will alienate many of your site visitors. Your online visitors don’t have the time, energy, or patience to fight their way through complex wording and hard sentences. They’ll just leave.
When writing content, or sales pages, I aim to make the readability of my text around 7-12 years old. Because if a child can understand my writing, a competent reader should find my text very easy to digest. And if it’s easy it’s more likely to be read.
Good grammar will help to make your writing clearer and easier to understand. However, when writing for the web, you can make the odd grammatical mistake if it makes your text easier to read.
You can find many good free online tools which can correct spelling and grammar. Grammarly and Hemmingway are two such tools. Grammar checking tools aren’t perfect, and you won’t want to carry out every suggestion, but they’ll help you to catch the worst errors.
A good way to check your text is to read it aloud. Do this three times at the top of your voice. This can help you to catch grammatical mistakes and poorly constructed sentences.
Finally, when you publish your agribusiness or farm website, get a friend or colleague to check it. Another pair of eyes is a great way to find errors you might have missed.
Making your text easy to scan
Most people, when reading online, scan text instead of reading it.
Your typical website visitor will do the following when they land on your site:
- Scan your content.
- They’ll then decide whether your content is of value.
- The reader will then either reread your content (if they deem it useful) or ignore it.
So make your content scannable because more people will read it. Resulting in more business for you.
How to make your content scannable
Here are some techniques to help your content get read.
First, break all you text into sections and subsections. And give these sections titles and subtitles. A reader should be able to scan your titles and have a rough idea of what your websites is about.
Bulleted lists, bullet points and numerals list to make your content faster to read. Bolding certain key points on a webpage will help the important things stand out.
The size of your text is important too. Your body text should be at least is 11 pixels or 12 pixels high. Make your titles and headings bigger than your body text.
If you make your titles and headings a similar size to your body text, the eye will struggle to tell the two apart – it’ll look like an intimidating wall of text.
Black text on a white background is still the easiest way for the eye to comprehend text. Ideally, you should display the bulk of your text this way. It’s okay to have the odd bit of text with a coloured background but you need to make sure you choose contrasting colours.
Many web designers make the mistake of placing text on images and photos. This can make any text hard to read as it blends into the background image. If you must overlay text on an image, give that text a background colour – it’ll be much easier to read.
Justify the bulk of you page text left-to-right. Centred text is fine for titles and headers, but not for your body text. Reading lots of centred text is fatiguing for the eye.
Don’t use reverse text for your body copy. Reverse text is white text with a black background. Many readability studies have shown repeatedly that reverse text is tricky for people to read. In web design, the odd bit of reverse text is all right for headings and similar elements. But extensive amounts of body text set out this way will make reading difficult for your users.
Bold important phrases and parts of your text. It draws the eyes attention. Use this technique sparingly. If used too much, you’ll lose the overall effect.
Don’t capitalise all your text. Why? BECAUSE IT GIVES PEOPLE THE IDEA YOU ARE SHOUTING AT THEM. Besides, it’s tiring for the eye to read lots of capitalised text because the eye struggles to see the differences between each letter.
When writing online break up large paragraphs into smaller ones. This might not be grammatically correct, but it will help with making your text scannable. Varying your paragraph sizes can also help.
One-line paragraphs are okay to use too.
Bad navigation
A text-based menu is still the clearest and easiest way to create a good navigation experience for your website. There’s a reason Amazon and eBay still use a text-based menu. Because they work.
Don’t force desktop/laptop users to use a mobile-style menu (called a hamburger menu). In recent years mobile Internet has surpassed desktop/laptop usage. But many people and businesses will revert to a laptop/desktop when doing serious work (like buying something, or getting quotes, etc).
Forcing desktop users to use a mobile menu provides a horrible experience. It’s like giving someone the keys to a Ferrari and then asking them to take the bus.
Always make sure your menus are easy to read. So use large fonts, contrasting colours, and avoid transparency. The main menu on your website is important – it’s like the spine in a book; if removed the pages would fall out and you’d be left with a chaotic pile of paper.
Underline any text links and colour them blue. Blue text links have been used since the early Internet; they’re now an accepted standard. Blue links might look old fashioned (it’s why many arty web designers dislike them) but they give readers a clear indication of their navigational purpose.
Website hosting
If you want a fast website invest in good hosting. Many DIY web designers and even established web design companies ignore this fact.
A £3 per month web hosting package won’t be as fast as a £30 a month hosting package.
Let me explain why…
Cheap web hosting means your website is running on a shared server. Meaning your website is running alongside thousands of other websites, all on the same server, all sharing the same resources.
Some web hosting companies do a better job than others when dividing server resources between their users. But many well known web hosting companies overprovision their web servers (placing far too many websites on a single server). Over provisioned servers are often slow; the worst servers will often crash during peak periods because of excessive load.
You don’t want your site crashing during busy periods. Because you’ll lose sales, it provides a bad experience for your users, and many won’t bother to visit your site again.
It’s an excellent idea to use an uptime monitoring tool to periodically check your domain and hosting. These tools will notify you when your sites are offline. These tools can help you keep an eye on your hosting company and ensure your site isn’t plagued by downtime. If you’re a victim of crappy web hosting, find a better web host.
I do offer Webhosting. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s quick and has great uptime. Just click here to enquire about my Webhosting services.
What is SEO? And how can it help your agribusiness?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a way of getting people on to your site who’ve never visited your site before. It’s a form of Internet marketing.
Good SEO can help your website appear higher in the search results. And it may help put you above your competition in Google.
Many professional webmasters will tell you SEO complicated. Honestly, it isn’t.
Here’s my biggest SEO tip. It’s a simple tip which has worked for me for fifteen years: Build a fast website with good content.
That tip is especially true for agricultural websites. Here’s why it works:
- Long content builds a more convincing argument of why people should do business with you.
- Long content gives Google, and the other search engines, a better understanding of what your business is about. This can result in higher rankings and you’ll appear in a broader number of Google searches.
- Google likes fast websites. They even provide tools for website owners to test and improve their site’s speed (the tool is called Google Page Speed Insights). Google tends to reward faster website and punish slower ones. After all, a fast website provides a better experience. And Google wants its users to have the best experience possible – otherwise they might switch to another search engine.
Conclusion
Is there more to building a website than I’ve mentioned? Yes, there certainly is.
But the things I’ve mentioned in this guide, are the biggest problems made by those working in agriculture. So, if you run a website, or you are planning to build a website for your farm (maybe as a farm diversity project), try carrying out some of these suggestions. You will get better results.
Remember: Everybody loves a fast site. No one ever said: I just love using slow websites.
If the thought of doing all this bores you to tears, or scares the bejeezus out of you, then let me build a fast website for you.
My speedy websites start at only £99.
It only takes a minute to get started.
Why not do it now, before you forget.