Small business web design: Advance Agra Service is a small, family-owned seed supply company that sells corn and soybean seeds to farmers in Virginia and North Carolina. They have been in business since 2004. Their existing website was in WordPress but was outdated and was not mobile friendly. This caused difficulty for the dealers, who often had sales discussions with farmers in their fields. I met with the owner to discuss their brand and what sets them apart, as well as their needs in a website. I then set to work on a complete redesign of their site in WordPress, including writing much of the content throughout the site.
Advance Agra Service places an emphasis on research and testing in order to provide the best yielding products by location for their customers. Since they are a family-owned business, they also pride themselves on great customer service with a personal touch. These were elements that their previous website was not featuring clearly. For instance, their research page had no written introduction explaining the importance of their testing. And while they had pictures of their customers, there were no customer quotes written on the site.
Their new home page features a banner that introduces what they do. This is followed by a concise description of the business and a visual emphasis on its three main components. The rest of the page is visually broken up into sections with calls to action throughout. It includes two sections that feature their customers and customer quotes.
The about page from the old site was actually split into 5 different pages with its own sub-menu. I consolidated this into one longer about page to better tell the story of their organization and broke it up into shorter sections.
The new research page is more visual and organized. It includes an introduction paragraph about the testing, and an accordion separates the research results by year, highlighting the most recent year. I also created graphics of the map with seed type to more easily identify the location of testing.
My favorite change in the new website was the products section. Before, the only way a site visitor could see the products was to download a PDF of the latest Seed Selection Guide. For the new site, I created a page for each of the products, so that customers can easily view the details and benefits and can navigate from one product to the next.
The end result is a mobile-friendly site that emphasizes Advance Agra Service’s mission to provide research-backed products and great customer service. It also allows their dealers to easily showcase the research results and products from their phone to a potential customer.
