Happy D Ranch Worm Farm
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Happy D Ranch Worm Farm :: www.happydranch.com ::
is in the business of providing worms and accessories for home vermicomposting.
When the owner of the Happy D Ranch Worm Farm first contacted me he already had a web site for his business. He had built it himself at one of the free web page hosting companies. He wanted to expand it and enable it to take credit card orders from a shopping cart system.
I helped him choose a professional hosting company and to register his domain name. As his needs expanded beyond what that company provided I helped him locate a second company that provided more services for less money and I helped him transfer the domain from his old provider to the new one.
The theme of the site is definitely set in the old west, complete with worm ranch hands. The graphic design elements that are used, from the rope of the background to the barbed wire of the horizontal rules to the planks on the navigation signpost all fit into the western theme. This site uses a lot of graphics but it would have been difficult to bring off this theme without them. I'd like to say that they are used sparingly but I'm not sure everyone would agree. They are used moderately and tastefully however. The owner of the site likes the look-and-feel that the images give, especially Duke the Wormboy, an animated GIF that was professionally created by an artist who used scanned pencil drawings of Duke that the owner's daughter originally created.
The Happy D Ranch web site gives a lot of good advice about composting with worms. Their catalog has some of the best products, books and videos available at the best prices on the net. They support their customers with a discussion forum where anyone can ask questions about worms, the EliminatorTM or the Can-O-WormsTM, which are home vermicomposting bins that they feature on their site.
Happy D Ranch chose to use the Americart premium shopping cart service. They pay more for this service than for other available shopping carts, in fact one is included free from the company that hosts their site, but everyone gets better service. Americart is easy to configure for me. I can put code on any page on the site and it will utilize Americart's server software. Many carts require pages to be in a special directory before they can work and as a designer I have to figure out how to present the product information on one page and the ordering information on another. I don't like being forced into a non-intuitive directory structure. Americart solves this for me. It is more secure for the customers because their credit card information never leaves Americart's servers. Not even a partial credit card number is ever emailed. It is quite convenient for the owners of Happy D Ranch to access their orders online and to process them. Their customers get value from the security and Happy D gets value because it takes less time for me to add shopping cart code to their pages. If they used Cyber Cash then it would be even more convenient for them because the credit cards would automatically be processed. I wish I could talk more of my clients into using Americart.
The Worm Talk forum (formerly COW Talk which stood for Can-O-WormsTM) is where the folks at Happy D Ranch can talk to their customers. It was set up as a place where people who own the Can-O-WormsTM could come and ask specific questions. It has grown into a community of dedicated vermicomposters who share information with each other. It has been a great place to post announcements, contests and holiday specials which gives a reward to their dedicated customers and works as an incentive to make people come back to their site. This keeps them buying products from the Happy D Ranch. It was nice that the acronym for the Can-O-WormsTM, COW, worked so well in a western ranch motif. In spite of this they decided to rename the forum to Worm Talk when they began selling the EliminatorTM systems.
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