Our first attempt at design was a success, we were able to add pictures, color, different fonts, different backgrounds and tried to put everything we could into the page. If I liked a font, I threw it in. If I saw a background I liked on the internet, I put it on one of my pages. Looking back at it, you can see that it was almost a childish effort to put a lot of "pretty" things on the site. It was fun to do, and there was so much for us to try to put into our pages. Some of the fonts were not "universal" fonts, and only worked on my computer. The page resulted in a collage of unrelated images and colors. We were like a kid with a new box of 64 crayons, with the sharpener in the back.

Our youngest son, Kerry, was at the University of Alabama, majoring in Computer Science. He put a lot of time and effort into the web page, and gave us the foundation for the page we ultimately published.

The bottom line was that it got us online, the boys were able to see the pictures and we got a little visibility from customers (a very little). If we told someone to go see something on our web site, they may have had to hunt for a little bit, but eventually they got it.

We realized how powerful a business venture the internet could be after our Great Pyrenees, Dixie, gave birth. We put the pictures up on the internet and were surprised at how quickly people wanted to buy these dogs. So we knew we could go somewhere with this.

In December of last year, our site looked like this (the button links at the bottom do work so you can see how "diverse" our site was) -- This opens in a separate window, because you may get lost if you start working through the links.:

Polaroid Effect

As the farm grew, a few more people made contact with us through the internet. We began to develop a business model, that included a web page. At the same time, my middle son, Lee, was completing his masters degree in information technology. He was eager for a challenge, and talked me into getting a domain name and a new host. We chose www.motesclearcreekfarms.com. We decided to have a single template for the pages. At the time, our site was up to 25 pages, each had a different look. We had the basic 5 pages (Home, Does, Bucks, Dogs, and For Sale), pages for a few of the goats, and pages which have pictures of the farm support equipment and general pictures of our farm. Our directory structure was not developed with growth in mind. We only had one folder in the root directory (images).

It was relatively easy to make a switch with such a small site. Over Christmas, 2002, I visited California and Lee and I sat down and developed the site, including the creation of our "Tennessee" buttons and a new banner. We also added some music to the flags (which still works on our current home page), and Lee made a South African Flag with Venus' image superimposed on it. He gave that flag the function of turning off the music if you didn't want to listen to it. I don't know about you, but I have been to a number of web sites that have music in the background that plays so loud that leave their site as quick as I can. I like having the option to play it if I want, and to turn it off whenever I want.

In terms of readability, it was a great leap. In terms of salability, Lee set up a directory structure which is still in use today.

We were still in the dark ages of digital images, though. So, for Christmas, I got a digital camera. Instead of having to scan pictures, I could now take hundreds of pictures, just hoping to get a goat behaving properly for one of them (sort of the same story with taking pictures of my Granddaughters when they were two years old).

In January, our site, with the new domain name, looked like this:

Scotch Tape

We still used too many different colors, and were limited with the buttons on top. We wanted something that could expand a little more. So we knew we should put the buttons on the side. That way, we could expand from the 5 buttons we had, to the 15 buttons we have today. So, we made some minor modifications. Additionally, Lee was working with some Java applications, and figured out how to make our creek "move". It really was a good effect. We still have a larger version of that effect on our site here. We added a different color scrollbars, and had some rollover effects (which don't work on the example). We also changed from a fixed size site, to one that expanded based on your screen resolution. We also added a weather page, which has not completely dropped off our site yet.

As you can see, we just made minor changes, but they were in the right direction. We started to look at our "hit" numbers, and saw they were steadily increasing. And after the kids from our early spring kidding were maturing, we were able to sell just about all of them through contacts we met online looking at our For Sale page. Our $200 investment in annual fees for internet hosting and domain name was paid off months ago, and it appeared in April that this would be the first year we could claim a profit on the farm -- thanks mostly to the internet.

In March, our site looked like this:

Photo Corners

By the summer, the "brown" feel of the site was getting tiring. We wanted to make a change to the colors of the site to a summery green. We also began compiling information for articles which we would write. Many people were just like us, getting started in the business, and they had the same questions as us. We may not be experts, but we have our experiences to grow off, and wanted to provide a venue to put our thoughts up there. We have received a lot of positive feedback from our articles, and we will continue to update that section. To cap off the articles, we put together a recommended reading page with links to the books on Amazon.com.

We wanted to speed up our site a little by removing most of the images from the main page. I had just bought a new computer, which helped speed up my ability to do some work on it, but since we live so far off the beaten path, we still remain in the dark ages of internet dial-up. When we connect at 37 kbits/second, it is a great victory. Most sites want increased load speed to keep from alienating their customers. We did it to keep from alienating ourselves. Additionally, we learned how to optimize pictures through some of the software we have. Remarkably, we were able to take some pictures that took over a minute to load, and make them so they loaded in just a few seconds, without losing any quality. As an example, the thumbnails on this page (with the links to the older pages) would have been over 150 kb and would have taken a whopping 47 seconds to load on our connection. Now, they are only 3.5 kb, and should take less than 2 seconds each. We also changed our "Tennessee" buttons to show up as a repeating background in a table, instead of as individual images. Instead of having to read 15 buttons, your browser now only reads one, and repeats it 15 times.

We also added a working guestbook and some added functions to our site. By now, all of the styles on our pages were from a style sheet, making it easier to make global changes to the site. Plus, we added a Links page to allow to link some of our friends and, since we were making so many changes to the site, we added a New page.

Additionally, we started showing our goats in various goat shows. We were able to post pictures to those shows on the web site, and after a couple rounds of shows, our goats are starting to show real well.

In November, our site looked like this:

Overhead Projector Slide

Now, we have completely changed over to Active Server Pages and change the look of the site every few months as a seasonal thing. At times, we have snow in the hills of Eastern Tennessee on our banner and are preparing for another winter on the farm, or hearts and shamrocks based on the holiday.. We are also using global variables to make changes to the site easier, and "Include" files to make updating the page across the entire site easier. When we made the change, we changed over 150 pages, and it took a couple of days to get all of the changes in place. Now, we can make as radical of a change as we just made just by changing seven lines of code and uploading it to the web server. We plan on making seasonal changes 5-6 times a year.

Ultimately, we are going to get database connectivity to have our pages driven from the information in a database. We have been working on a number of things to move us to the next level of web design. We finally have a contact form (which is not all that complex - but it does have form validation and is another way for our potential customers to make contact with us). You can see the page as it is now. We plan on continuing to learn about the various things we can put on the web. Soon, we will have a "Flash" application online, and more great things. It really is amazing, though, when we look back at the first effort.

Finally, we are in the web design business now, and think that our story is similar to most people out there. When we began, we were skeptical that the internet could really provide business to the small town goat farmer. Well, we were wrong. Now that we have spent a year in the "dot.com" boer goat business we know that success is just a click away. We also felt the prices for web design were way too high. So we wanted to offer a quality alternative. Check out the templates on our examples page. We can provide one of those for you for a very modest fee. If you want something customized, we can do that as well. If you want something simpler, just let us know.

Thanks for reading this. Hopefully you will be compelled to provide some feedback to us on our site. And blame/credit Lee for the picture borders and the post-it notes. He wanted a "scrapbook" feel -- although as die-hard scrapbookers, we truly object to the scotch tape effect.