We talked to Web Hosting customer Matt, a farming advice consultant from www.grassrootsfarming.co.uk about his experiences of building a website - and a business - with the help of Daily Internet.

Firstly, what made you start the business?

My background is in practical farm management. After eight years as a Farm Manager with Co-op Farms, helping to manage several large estates round the country, I was offered the position as Farm Manager at Moulton college in Northamptonshire and enjoyed the mix of farm management and teaching.

After a successful period, I was offered a position as Senior Farm Consultant with a large South West consultancy firm. During this time, I saw that there was a niche for a more personal approach to rural business consultancy offering a range of services and advice tailor-made to individuals rather than a one size fits all approach. I decided to take a chance and start my own business.

Was it an existing business that you decided to take online or is it a question of the internet really opening up a business opportunity for you?

In my view it is imperative that any business, no matter what service or product they supply, has a presence on the net. In the majority of cases it is people’s first port of call when they want to find any information. In fact I was recently told by one of my clients that they are suspicious of a business if they can’t find it on the internet! So with this in mind, having a website was an integral part of my business plan.

Talk us through the evolution of your website

The Grassroots Farming website had humble beginnings. I decided that I was going to construct the site myself, so I started by looking at all the websites that I went on and seeing what I liked about them and came up with a rough layout.

Most importantly I needed to work out what I wanted to say, as we all know prettiness and no depth leads to disaster! So I took the best bits from some of my other advertising material and built on that.

I then combined the layout and content in a well known word processing programme and created my first website. This, however, was not the best way to do it as there were issues with the coding created by this programme. As it had been suggested to me by potential clients that they would like me to design and maintain a website for them in the future I decided to invest in a web authoring programme (Dreamweaver) and set about learning some coding.

This created a dramatic improvement on the visuals of the site - and also the compatibility of the site with browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome which more and more people are now using…

I currently use Daily Internet Web Hosting, but if I hadn’t intended to produce more websites in the future I would have tried the Instant Website package.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in getting your site to where it is now?

The biggest challenge was to know when to stop! The more you learn about web authoring and the more you take notice of the good websites out there the more you want to incorporate in your own. You have to remember that it is a business tool at the end of the day and a clear, concise message is the most important thing.

Also spending time increasing the viability of the site is important. There is no quick fix to this - hard work and following suggestions in forums and articles like those by Daily are important. There are lots of businesses who claim they will get you a top ten listing in search engines - my advice is to read the small print!

What’s next for Grassroots?

With help from the website my business is growing all the time. Part of this is due to using Google Ads to place my site on relevant searches. Hopefully I can transfer some of this success to more rural businesses by providing a web authoring service for them. The Grassroots Farming Advice site will continue to evolve as time and necessity dictate.

And finally, what attracted you to Daily.co.uk?

As most rural businesses in the UK will say… Buy British! Daily is hosted in the UK and that was a big reason behind my decision. Pricing and package specs are also very competitive and communication is very good.