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             With all the internet craze out there it’s easy to feel like you’re an idiot living in the stone age if you don’t have a website for your nursery, garden center or landscaping business. The fact is, the internet can wait until you have a plan for how to use it, and how to pay for it. All to often I hear about small businesses, feeling left behind, dishing out good money after bad to create an internet site that has no real purpose, and that is difficult and expensive to maintain. At Spring Meadow Nursery we’ve been thinking about creating a web site for over five years, but it has only been within the last few months that we actually did anything about it. We recently launched two internet sites, each having its own purpose. As I began this cyber journey I had very little help along the way. Perhaps a few tidbits from this magazine or that, offering a few tips or general philosophical ideas, but offering little practical information. Most of the articles I’ve seen have been by big companies who either hire a web design company or a computer programmer and the author has little clue as to how to build a web. Let me start by telling you that I am not a computer person, I’m a plantsman looking for another way to communicate information about my plants. I am not a web expert, only one guy who has a few months of real life experience to offer, simply because I wish I’d an article like this when I started.

            My journey started last winter when office computer was updated. Dale Deppe the owner of our nursery got the internet ball rolling when he had Dell load Microsoft FrontPage2000, a web building program, on my new machine. We had discussed using a web building program and had figured it was worth the meager price of $150 for FrontPage, compared to paying $10,000 to $30,000 to have someone else design our site. What did we have to loose. The other motivating factor for attempting to build our own site was the cost and ease of maintaining the site. When you have to go to a professional webmaster to update your site you pay by the hour, so it’s either going to be expensive, and your going to be real reluctant to make an changes when you have to pay someone $75 per hour.

HAVE A GOAL

We had spent several years looking at what other people were doing on the web and had finalized our own web goals. We wanted to create two sites: a consumer site to spread the word on new and improved flowering shrubs, and another site devoted primarily to our customers.

The consumer site now called www.ColorChoicePlants.com was designed as a simple and inexpensive way to pull new products through the market. We’re a wholesale propagation well removed from the consumer, so we have no interest in selling plants on this site. The whole goal is to help promote new plants so our customers and their customers could sell more plants. Consumers can learn about new and improved plants, learn how to care for them, and find a list of retailers who sell these new varieties.

Our business to business site (B2B in web talk) can be reached at the domain names www.PottedLiners.com or www.SpringMeadowNursery.com.  As you can see this one site has two different names or addresses (or more correctly URL’s). Typing either one of these in the address box of your browser will take you to the same place. Adding a second URL path to a your website is called an alias. It can be a helpful tool when you can’t make up your mind on a domain name or if you want to use several strategies to get people to your site. We were, however, are not so clever as come to this strategy directly. When we went to secure the domain names www.SpringMeadow.com , or www.SpringMeadowNursery.com these names were already taken, so we opted for www.PottedLiners.com. PottedLiners.com tells you what we sell. It needs no explanation to people in the nursery business. We did eventually obtained the rights to the name www.SpringMeadowNursery.com so we ended up with two domain names. We were quite fortunate to get our name back, and we feel it’s also a good name because it easy for our customers to remember. The lesson is that you don’t need to rush to build your web site, but you should rush to secure your web address, especially if you want to use your company name. The odds are your all ready too late to get your company name. Even so, you should secure a domain name as soon as possible. Good names are going fast, but with some creative thinking you can still secure a good, easy to remember name that says something about your business. Securing an address is easy. All you need a list of potential names, $70 (payable by credit card) and a visit to either www.Register.com or www.NetworkSolutions.com. At either of these sites your can check to see if your name choices are taken or available. Some sites even have programs that generate potential names based on keywords that you enter. The bottom line is that if you expect to be on the web in the future, secure at least one domain name and park it until your ready to build.   

            Our main goal for our Spring Meadow business site is was not e-commerce. Our preference is to talk to our customers if possible so we can give them adequate service, suggest new products and to better understand our customer’s needs. Our underlying goal was to provide customers with value added information and tools to make doing business with Spring Meadow an easy and pleasurable experience. If you’ve lost your catalog, you can view it on our website. If your want to check the availability on a plant, but it’s after 5 o’clock, just check the web. If your need more in depth information about one of our plants, it’s on the web. Do you need to order a catalog, we’ve got a request form on our website. We also wanted to show our customers more plant pictures than we can print in our catalog. We can only afford to put so many colored pictures in our printed catalog, but with our website, we can let our customers see hundreds of different plant photos. Because we sell many new and hard to find varieties, it’s real important that we can show our customers what all these different cultivars look like.

 BEGIN CONSTRUCTION

Once we had our strategies, and our registered domain names we were ready to build. Armed with FrontPage2000 I dove in. FrontPage is a relatively simple program. If you’re familiar with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Internet Explorer you’ll feel right at home. I’ve also heard read some good reviews for NetObjects Fusion, another Web building program, but I’ve never used it, or even seen it for that matter. It is an alternative for those of you who want to build a web, but have no interest in coding HTML (the computer language for the internet). In either case the program operates in a what you see is what you get style and does all the coding in the background.

            FrontPage2000 has a wizard, with dozens of ready made templates. I tried this option but was frustrated with the simple designs. From my way of thinking, I didn’t want my web to look like everyone else who owns FrontPage. I recommend going to FILE, NEW, WEB then choosing the option called ONE PAGE WEB. This option is not for just making a one page web, it allows you to build a web, one page at a time, starting with your home page. Shifting over to the navigation view you simple right click on you home page icon and click NEW PAGE to add new, lower level pages. The basic process is to create a series of new pages and to name them immediately after creating them. Before you know it, your site has structure.

DESIGN YOUR STRUCTURE

           You should have a rough of you site structure before you begin. For example, I started with a home page that simply, and quickly lets our visitors know where they are and what they’ll find at our site. The pages added directly below our home page are general heading pages, i.e. ABOUT US, CATALOG REQUEST, ORDERING INFORMATION, THE PLANTS, LINKS, BREEDERS, and so on. I then proceeded to create new lower level pages below these pages. For example under ORDERING INFORMATION, I created more specific pages, i.e. TERMS, AVAILABILITY, PRICING and so on.

            You’ll find it very helpful to locate and examine existing sites on the web and pick and choose the structural features that best suit your needs. Don’t just visit nursery sites, but look at what other industries are doing too. The most important thing when building your structure is to think about what your customer would want. Keep the structure and navigation simple and as logical as possible.   

            One of the nice features on FrontPage is the ability to create shared borders. When in your home page, click on FORMAT, then click on SHARED BORDERS. This option allows you to create a shared theme throughout all your pages. I choose to make the top, left side and bottom consistent on all my pages with shared borders. Simply stated this means that no matter where you go in my website, the top, bottom and left column always looks the same. The only thing that changes when you change pages, is the page specific content. This allows you to have a constant design scheme, and to show your most common navigation buttons (links) on every page. Providing your basic navigation buttons, which allows access to your second level pages, is helpful to your visitors, making navigation easy and consistent.

CONTENT

           It may take you a while to learn the ins and out of FrontPage or whatever program you use, but it won’t take too long to become proficient enough to build a decent site. The most time consuming aspect of creating your site is going to be creating the content. This is something you’ll have to do no matter who designs your site. It should be relatively easy to create home page content. An ABOUT US content, that more thoroughly tells everyone what you do, should also be relatively simple. When looking to create content, look first to anything you’ve written, and have stored in your computer. It’s easy to cut and paste material out of Microsoft Word files and place them into a FrontPage document. I was able to utilize our company fact sheet, our catalog, and a host of plant related articles I’ve written over the years. This saved a lot of time, and with a bit of editing and manipulation these documents fit nicely into the website. After all, your web is just an extension of your current marketing efforts. The main difference is your publishing electronically instead of on paper. Don’t feel like you have to create a masterpiece on your first go round. It’s super easy to add a page anytime you develop new content. The beauty of building and running your own site is the ability to update it and improve it any time you want without having to fork out the big bucks.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Utilizing photographs on you site is an easy, although time consuming task. First you need photographs. Good photographs are hard to come by and take some time to accumulate. Be careful not to use images that don’t belong to you, unless you have permission. You may be violating someone’s copyrights. I’m constantly shooting plant photographs, and have been doing so for the last ten years. I shoot slides because I use my images for many different purposes such as lectures, advertisements, our catalog and now on our web site. I had to scan my slides into digital format before I could use them on the web. Scanning can sourced out, but can get expensive if you do a lot of slides. Another alternative is to buy a slide scanner. This can run anywhere from $500 to $5,000 for a decent scanner.  An easier option, if you have yet to accumulate images, is to use a digital camera. A digital camera is fast, relatively inexpensive and saves you the scanning costs. You don’t need, or for that matter don’t want, super quality, high resolution images for the web. Big, high resolution images are slow to load and can frustrate your visitors. I have found that images in the range of 250 to 300 pixels in height and width provide good viewing quality without compromising speed. I also use an image compression format called JPEG, at a quality level at 75. This too seems to provide decent quality and improves loading speed.

            Placing photographic images in FrontPage is easy. Place your cursor where you want the picture, then click the insert photo icon on the tool bar, then click on the image file name. That’s the easy part. The difficult, or more accurately the time consuming task, is preparing your images beforehand.  Most people tend to prep their photos in Adobe PhotoShop. I use a less expensive program called Lview Pro. (www.Lview.com) that I’ve found to be quite easy and very sufficient. Using Lview Pro I resize my images, crop them, and adjust the color and brightness as necessary. Then I save them to a file on my hard drive I’ve named “Web Images.”  This is a slow, and time consuming process, and after doing a few hundred images I now understand how people can spend $20,000 to buy a customized website. To make the task bearable, I try to prep and add a few images every week. This spreads out the fun, ha ha, and gives my  visitors something new every time they return. With practice, I can now prep and add an image in less than a minute. While photographs present their difficulties, the effort is well worth it. The web is the most cost effective way to show your customers your products and we’re fortunate to have such beautiful products to show off.

WEB EFFICIENCY

            To me, there’s nothing worse than going to a web site and having to wait for minutes for a page or image to load. It seems like hours, so you don’t want to subject your visitors to long waits or they’ll bolt. I also hate it when I have to sign up for a pass word to proceed, and if I have to wait for a password, I’m gone and I’ll never return. The real trick of web design, in my opinion, is to balance the design appeal and content with decent user speed. This is not an easy task, and I must admit that some of my pages are still too slow, but I’ve consciously make the compromise because I wanted the content. FrontPage offers a report option that tells you which of your pages are too slow. It also shows you an estimated load time on the lower tool bar. Once you see your estimated load time, you may have to make some adjustments to your page. Too much text, or too many images on a page will cause problems. At times you will be forced to split your text into multiple pages and to reduce your picture size our count. The Spring Meadow plant list is a very long document. It contains hundreds of plants with lengthy descriptions. I found that by breaking the list down to a series of pages based on alphabetic order, with links to the next alphabetic letter, solved our loading time dilemma. To provide photographs of the individual plants, I opted to use thumbnail images that very small and load fast. To see a larger image the user simply clicks on the thumbnail. This allowed me to provide hundreds of photographs without compromising my loading times.

            FEEDBACK

           Proving ways for your visitors to communicate back to you is very important. We have utilized a guest book on our ColorChoicePlants.com site to collect information about our visitors. On the SpringMeadowNursery.com site, we have a catalog request form which has been a very popular feature. These pages, called forms, can be created in FrontPage using a Wizard. We set these forms up so that the results are automatically e-mailed to us at the nursery. Each day I check my e-mail and print out numerous catalog requests. This saves our sales department phone time, and eliminates errors when gathering contact or account information. On our catalog request form we ask the visitor for standard information such as, contact name, address, e-mail address, etc., but we also ask them for other information, such as how they found us. This helps to determine how well our advertising working, and it lets know which search engines are directing visitors to our site. (I’ll talk more about search engines later).

            On both of our form pages, we’ve allowed a place for visitors to give unrestricted comments and feedback on the usefulness of the site. I know that my site has lots of room for improvement. I also know that I’m too close to the project to judge it fairly. Users will let you know what they like, what they hate and what they want you to add or change. You have to do this if you want to improve. After all, your site was created for your visitors and not for your own ego trip. This is the great thing about creating and updating your own web. You can very easily modify your web on a daily basis to meet your customers needs. Just open your FrontPage web file, make the adjustments and upload your revised web in minutes instead of days.

PROMOTING YOUR SITE      

Being a rookie, dare I say webmaster, I can’t say I know much on the subject of website promotions outside of what I’ve read and gleaned from others. Whole books have been written on the subject so I’ll just speak to the one that is addressed when you build your site; that’s formatting your site for search engines. Listing with search engines is one of the easiest, yet most difficult ways to promote your site. To list a site with a web page you simply go to Yahoo, Excite, Google etc, and click on the words “Add URL” and follow the instructions. It takes anywhere from three weeks to three months to see the results, however before you add your URL you’ve got some basic work to do on your site, specifically creating meta-tags. Meta-tags are, among other things, unseen programming codes which communicate to search engines the name of your site, the keywords you’ve chosen to help people find for your site, and they provide a description or summary of your site that is displayed in the search results brought up by an engine. You can add meta-tags to any page of your website, but most often they’re added to the home page, the place you want visitors to enter. With FrontPage, you create your meta-tags by right clicking on your page and choosing PAGE PROPERTIES and going to the custom tab. If you’re like me you’ll have to visit the help index a few times to correctly  install these tags. 

            Choosing the best keywords is a combination of art and science, but the best advice I can share with you is this: go to a search engine and start typing in the keywords you would choose to find a business like yours. Take some time and think about this because many search engines use these words to determine if, when and where you will show up in their search results. Be specific and try to think like your customer would. For example, some of the key words I used for our Spring Meadow site include: spring meadow nursery, liners, potted liners, seedlings, wholesale nursery, new plants, propagation, ColorChoice, flowering shrubs, etc. Be careful not to repeat any works more than three times, or to exceed 874 words because some search engines will reject your listing. To learn more about meta-tags and how to optimize them visit

http://www.scrubtheweb.com/  and www.northernwebs.com/  Both of these sites also offer free meta-tag analyzers that can help you tweak your keywords after you’ve published your website. There are many sites on the web that offer tips and tidbits on writing meta-tags and I feel like I’ve been to most of them.

On occasion I try searching for my site on various search engines. Sometimes I’m successful, some times I’m listed on page 20, and sometimes I’m not listed at all. Getting your nursery listed is on the first page of the results could be very important for your business. If I ran a mail order retail nursery, I’d probably hire a consultant to help me get on the first page of the search results, but I’m not and I haven’t. As a wholesale grower search engines are not quite that important. I hope my customers don’t need a search engine to find me. I can afford to tweak my meta-tags myself, and instead of investing in search engines and meta-tag consultants, I’ll use more direct ways to reach my customers and potential customers. One easy way to promote your site is to list the domain name on the literature you currently send out. Put it on your letterhead, your invoices, your catalog, your fax cover page, and all your other mailings. Promoting your site on your existing material is a free and easy way to promote you web. It’s a heck of a lot smarter than buying 30 seconds of super bowl air time, like a bunch of “what was there name?” defunked dot com companies did. Be creative not stupid.

 DO IT YOURSELF

Creating your own website with an off-the-shelf web building program is an affordable, often neglected option for small businesses. Doing it yourself with these programs may be the right choice for your business. It relatively easy, quite affordable and at times even fun, but it’s not for everyone. If you want a fully interactive e-commerce site with shopping carts, then you’ll need a professional. We’ve opted not to sell directly over the internet, but rather we use our site as a value added tool for our customers. It’s a place to see new plants, it’s a reference guide, it’s a way to communicate with customers, potential customers, plant breeders, garden writers and even end consumers. For our purposes it has worked just fine.

Sure I was scared and intimidated the day I first got FrontPage. I’m a plant nerd, not a computer nerd. But after only a few days of expletives, I got the hang of it. You know that if I can create two websites, you can create your own site. It’s been a fun, learning experience and while the sites I created aren’t necessarily hip, trendy and loaded with bells and whistles, they’re not too bad either. I’ve provided my customers with something useful  and at a reasonable cost. Perhaps you can too.           

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