Essential Farm Websites

Yes! Check out our in-depth comparison of farm website platforms, comparing GrazeCart vs. Shopify vs. Square. (For purposes of this comparison, we’re focusing solely on platforms that will enable you to have both your complete website and your online store together under one roof.)

We’re also available for a paid consultation to talk through your website needs and help you make a choice. This can be a matter of just a call or two, or for more complex needs we’ll develop a completely customized platform assessment for your farm. We’ll provide a budget based on your specific needs.

The core budget includes just the necessities so you have the freedom to choose add-ons, and you only pay for what you need!

We’ll be happy to send you a PDF menu of farm website options with pricing and detailed scope of work. Request yours!

🏁 Getting started: We don’t start building your farm website until we have absolutely everything we need in hand, because that helps us work efficiently, and makes it possible to offer this budget-friendly package!

After you pay your downpayment, we’ll send over a fill-in template to help you organize your text to connect with customers and drive sales, following our proven framework (includes SEO tips!). We’ll also share a spreadsheet so you can easily give us all your product details, and a link where you can drag-and-drop to share your photos with us. You’ll also tell us which template you’ve selected.

⏳Turnaround time: Depending on our waitlist status once you provide all of the info we need, we’ll have a complete farm website draft ready for you in as little as 3-6 weeks. We’ll customize the template you select, updating colors and fonts to match your farm brand, adding your text and photos, and setting up e-commerce according to your farm’s specific needs. (If you choose a Custom Website instead, that timeline from start to draft depends on your exact needs, as well as our waitlist status. It can be as little as 8-10 weeks.)

🚀 Preparing to go live: We’ll review the draft together, show you how to make website edits, make any revisions you might have, and then when you’re ready, we’ll go live!

📞 Need some extra support? We’ll be happy to host additional calls! If you select an Essential Website package, that choice is designed to deliver the most value for the smallest budget. So it doesn’t have extra calls built in, but we’ll send you a link to pay for those calls as needed, and you can user our scheduler to choose the date and time that works best for you. Likewise, this lean website package includes a small bank of time for revisions, so if you’d like additional revisions beyond what’s noted in the PDF, you can request additional billable hours.

Add-ons…

Our goal in developing the Essential Website package was to create a strong website at a modest budget. The core budget includes just the necessities so you only pay for what you need — you have the freedom to choose add-ons and complete control over your budget!

Calls…

When you’re deciding whether to work with us, your first call with us is free. Once you hire us, you’ll have a set number of calls included in your website package.

In order to keep the website budget lean, we haven’t padded it to accommodate all the possible calls a farm might want to have before hiring us, or to account for farms who might want a few extra calls during the website development process.

We'd love to get together with you and talk through any questions you have — whether it's how the website design process works, which platform might be the best fit, strategies for home page setup, support in filling out the text template, guidance on the e-commerce spreadsheet, or just about anything else! You can coordinate a billable call with your Grapevine contact.

We charge for our time because it’s important to us to be able to attract and retain top-notch talent. Our team is an amazing bunch of humans, with backgrounds in everything from farming and butchery to Master’s Degrees in graphic design and marketing.

No. In most cases, it’s actually more work to update an existing website than to start fresh. Doing it right the first time is the most cost-effective choice :)

If you have specific updates you want for your existing website, we offer that service hourly. We’ll be happy to provide an estimated of range of hours for the work you have in mind. If you’d like to polish up all angles of your website — design, messaging, SEO, backend, customer experience — the most efficient way to do that would be to start fresh with a new Essential Website.

All the work we do is work for hire — you own the final result! We’ll always be happy to help with website updates, but you’ll have full owner-level access and you can choose who works on your site.

Using a content management platform (CMS) such as GrazeCart, Shopify, etc. means that your farm’s website will be woven into that system. So you can’t just pick it up and plop it into another platform. (Back when some of us started designing websites in the early 2000s, you could do that, and move your site to any hosting platform you wanted — but that meant you also had to program all the functionality you wanted from scratch, because there was no platform offering that built-in software. So a farm e-commerce website with today’s functionality would have cost about 30-40 times what today’s websites cost!)

If you ask for our help registering a domain name, we’ll make sure it’s registered directly in your name, with your contact info.

All those details are in the PDF! Request yours.

The first step to quoting your needs is to schedule a consulting call, billable hourly. Reach out to get started.

Schedule a call to get started! Your first call is free, and additional calls are pre-paid. (If you haven’t received our packet yet, that’s the first step: Get started!)

Once you’re ready to have us develop a scope and quote, we’ll send an invoice for a non-refundable downpayment to cover our time for that work.

If your existing website is in GrazeCart, and you want to update the design, we’ll need to make edits directly in the live website. There’s no way to build a separate draft website there, so we need to work in your live website because that’s where your customer data and products already live. This means you won’t be able to review and sign off on edits before they go live, but we can work quickly to review the changes together and make updates as needed.

(If you’d prefer, we can quote an additional fee to develop the new site in a separate account instead and then transfer everything over on launch day. This is a labor-intensive process.)

If your existing website is in any other platform, we’ll build your revamped website separately in draft mode so that you can review it before going live.

The most efficient and effective approach will be to build a complete e-commerce website for your farm, so we recommend either waiting until you’re ready to do that, or prioritizing it now.

However, if you’d prefer to build your site now without e-commerce, you can choose an e-commerce package, and we can build the website on GrazeCart, Square, or Shopify without full functionality.

You can fill out your website text questionnaire to the best of your ability, and use “coming soon” messaging. For instance, when you describe ways customers can shop with you, you can say something like “Online ordering and home delivery are coming soon! Meantime, visit our farm store from 12-5, Weds- Fri.”

If you have some idea what your product details will be, along with delivery areas or pickup options, you can provide the info you have.

If you really have no product details available, we can skip all of the e-commerce setup. We may be able to offer a discount on your package, which we can discuss before you pay your project downpayment.

Either way:

We can keep the shopping portion of your site turned off when we launch the website. We’ll use “coming soon” messages where needed, for instance in the top block of your homepage where the product feed should be.

It will look a bit like a work in progress. Within the lean budget of an Essential Website package, we won’t have wiggle room to completely customize it to look like it’s not meant to be an e-commerce website.

Later, when you’re ready to add online shopping, you can work on that on your own, or you can hire us to configure it. We can provide a quote for that work when you’re ready, based on our current pricing at that time.

We’re here for you! We'd love to get together with you and talk through any questions you have — whether it's how the website design process works, which platform might be the best fit, strategies for home page setup, support in filling out the text template, guidance on the e-commerce spreadsheet, or just about anything else!

Call fees: In order to keep the website budget lean, we haven’t padded it to accommodate all the possible calls a farm might want to have before hiring us, or to account for farms who might want a few extra calls during the website development process. Instead, we charge for those calls separately, so you have complete control of the budget and you can choose how many calls you want.

You can coordinate a billable call with your Grapevine contact.

Website updates: Before the website launches, we’ll train you how in managing typical update needs if you select a package that includes that. We’ll also be happy to help with updates on an ongoing basis, whether you need help once a week or once a year. We can help at our current hourly rate, or set up a package based on your needs.

Post-launch support & troubleshooting: If you need support after the website launches, we’re available to help with that, too. Service is available at our current hourly rate. We have to charge for that time because we don't receive a monthly fee to cover support, which your website platform provider does. You can also contact your platform (Grazecart, Shopify, etc) directly for free support. Likewise, if you’re using any third-party apps, you can contact the app developer for support.

Grapevine builds websites for all sorts of local food folks, whether you’re running a farmers market, farm stop, food hub, health food store, local restaurant, farm to school program, food council, organization, or beyond.

Our Essential Website package and templates are designed for the needs of farms, farmers markets, and other local food retail. If you don’t fit in one of those categories, these templates may not be the best fit, but we’d love to build a Custom Website for you. Get in touch!

Yes! Grapevine is a full service farm marketing agency. We offer advertising, graphic design, email marketing, social media support, and more. Request a menu of services.

This is a great time to gather all your high-res photos, write down your product details, and start thinking about your farm’s story and information you’d like to share with potential customers.

If you don’t have many photos, you can start building your library of photos. Check out our tips for DIY farm photography!

Our Essential Website package has optional add-ons for buy-down CSAs and recurring subscriptions, so if you’re using one of those models, then yes!

If you have a traditional CSA or want a build-your-own box program, check out specialty platforms like Local Food Marketplace, Farmigo, or CSAware!