Prepared for Little Star Farm

What it would cost

One page, no surprises, and no charge for the concept you have already been clicking through.

The build

$1,500

One time. Half to start, half when it goes live.

A site that is pages costs $1,000. This one is $1,500 because it takes the booking as well, and every u-pick evening, private u-pick and field trip you sell today is arranged by phone or email.

Booking on the site, for u-pick evenings, private u-pick, Bloom and Learn and Petals and Play, at your own published prices
A date picker that only offers the evenings you are actually open, so nobody books a night you are closed
Your minimums built in, so a Bloom and Learn booking cannot come through with fewer than ten students
A running total that counts the free chaperone per ten students before anyone reaches the payment step
Payment connected to your own account, so the money lands exactly where it lands today
Eight pages built out: home, u-pick evenings, private u-pick, field trips, private events, photography, how to find the farm, and booking
A clean address for every page, written from the name of the page, so /private-u-pick and /field-trips read the way they should
The farm's whole year on the home page: market dates, u-pick evenings, hours, admission, and every pop-up date
Season dates kept as content in one place, so a date changes once and changes everywhere it appears
Built for a phone first, then a tablet, then a desktop, reading the real width of the screen it is on
Your own photographs served full size, so the flowers arrive sharp instead of soft
One of your bouquets set as the share picture, so a link posted to Facebook or texted to a friend arrives with a flower in it
Set up so Google can show your address, your hours and your season right in the search results
A security certificate that renews itself, and a footer year that is right every January on its own
Launched on little-star-farm.com, the domain you already own
Yours outright, with no monthly fee attached to the build

Care plan, optional

$50 a month

Or $500 for the year if you would rather pay once.

Hosting, the security certificate and software updates, all handled
Backups and monitoring, so you know the site is up
Next season's dates loaded into the booking page before you open
Pop-up nights added or pulled the day the weather decides for you
Prices and minimums changed whenever you change them
Thirty minutes a month of other changes, hours, photographs, a new offering
A check-in before the season opens and another after it closes
No contract. Stop any time

If you would rather not have one, that is completely fine. The site is still yours and it still works. You would just be handling the hosting and the updates yourselves, and the next section is an honest look at what that involves.

Worth understanding either way

What changing one date actually takes

The care plan is optional and it stays optional. Before you decide, here is a pop-up date moving, which is the change your site will need more than any other.

This is the same entry the booking page reads its dates from, so editing it is what puts a new evening up for sale.

{
  label: "August U-Pick pop-ups",
  window: "August 8 to August 30",
  detail:
    "Select dates, 5:00 to 7:30 PM, no appointment necessary. 8/8, 8/15, 8/22, 8/23, 8/29 and 8/30.",
  start: 8,
  end: 8,
  tone: "marigold",
},

Set up the project on your computer
Find the right file among seventeen
Edit it without breaking the syntax
Run it locally to check
Commit and push
Wait for the deploy, then look at it live

The accounts come to about $20 a month, and I would sooner say so plainly. What costs is that those six steps happen every single time. Your dates move every year, opening day, the pop-up nights, the last Saturday at the market, and then the weather moves them again.

A freelance web developer in the United States runs $50 to $150 an hour, with the middle sitting around $85. The half hour of changes in the plan is worth about $42 on its own. Add the $20 of accounts and you are already at $62, before anyone has watched whether the site is up.

Your footer has read 2023 for three years and your home page still says the season ends August 2nd. Neither of those cost money to prevent. Once the site is taking bookings, a date left stale is not just untidy, it is an evening nobody could buy. That is what the fifty is for. Run it yourself and I will hand over every account and walk whoever takes it through all six steps.

The accounts, and what each one costs

Hosting, Vercel Pro
Their free tier is for personal, non-commercial projects, so a business needs the paid one.
$20 a month
Code repository, GitHub Free
Free for one person, genuinely.
Nothing
Security certificate
Issued and renewed automatically every ninety days.
Nothing
Domain renewal
You already pay this, and it does not change either way.
About $20 a year

How it goes

Four steps, and the season picks the week

It is about two weeks of work once you say go. Your market runs through September 19 and the last pop-up is August 30, so building it over the fall would leave the site settled, tested and taking bookings well before opening day next May. That is the right shape for this one, because you want the first booking of the season to be a real customer, not a rehearsal.

01
You say go, and send me the photographs you want on it. That is the only piece I need from you, and it is the piece everything else waits on.
02
You give me next season's dates as you settle them, and tell me where you want the money to land. Anything still up in the air goes in as it stands today, and I change it the day you know.
03
I build the pages out, wire the booking to your account, put your photographs in, and point little-star-farm.com at it.
04
You book a visit yourself, on your own phone, and we watch the money arrive before a single customer sees it. Your current site stays up the whole time and comes down only when you say so.

The terms

Simple, and yours to keep

Nothing here is written to keep you. If we build this together and you decide in a year that you want it somewhere else, you can take the whole thing with you.

You own all of it: The site, the code, the domain, the words and the booking. If you ever want to move it somewhere else or hand it to somebody else, you can, and I will help you do it.
The money is yours, and it never touches me: Booking connects to an account in the farm's name, and every payment goes from the customer straight into it. I do not hold your money, I do not take a cut of a booking, and I have no access to the account beyond wiring it up.
No lock-in: The care plan is month to month and optional. Nothing about the build depends on you keeping it.
Your current site: It stays exactly where it is and keeps working until you have seen the new one and told me you are happy with it.
The concept is free: What you have been clicking through cost you nothing and comes with no obligation, whatever you decide.

A note from Kate

The reason I stopped on your farm is the ponies. Two girls wanted room for them, thirteen years went by, the girls grew up and took the ponies with them, and now all 18 acres are flowers. That story is sitting on your About page and it is the best thing you have.

Your photographs are lovely and the site is not doing them any favors. A phone gets handed a layout built for a screen half its width, then magnifies the whole thing to fit.

That is why the flowers arrive soft, and on a farm whose product is how the flowers look, it is the thing I would fix first.

The other thing I kept noticing is that every u-pick evening, every private booking and every field trip you sell is arranged by phone or by email.

A teacher wanting to bring thirty kids has to catch you, and you have to catch her back. That is the part of the site I would most like to build for you.

You are in the middle of your season right now and I am in no hurry at all. Look at this once the last pop-up is done and the market has wrapped up. If you want it live before opening day next May, we have the whole winter.

Click through the concept and pick it apart. If it is not the direction you want to go, tell me and I will not be the least bit offended.

Kate Parker, She Thrives Software Consulting
(209) 815-0827, kateparker@shethrivesmarketing.com

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