Endeavor Creative

I hired Taughnee to design my website for the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market, and I hardly know where to start my accolades. The experience of working with Taughnee has been incredible: empowering, exciting, and life-changing!  I gave her an outline and the text to build a fairly simple, straightforward website.  Taughnee took my ideas and RAN with them!

Taughnee, the designer. First, she created an extremely appealing and attractive design. Using my photographs and some vague ideas, she developed not only a beautiful look, but gave our site a perfect mascot (an adorable rooster) and beautiful, logical connections between the pages. The site flows beautifully, and I LOVE how it looks!

Taughnee, the teacher. Taughnee installed my website on a framework using Expression Engine, which I absolutely love using, because I CAN DO IT! She taught me in just a few minutes how to use EE to change my own content, add more information (recipes, newsletters, blogs, vendor information, schedules), and even add my own photos to the pages. I’m becoming more proficient at using Expression Engine every time I use it—it’s user-friendly, intuitive, and fun and easy to use. I don’t have to know any HTML code! After Taughnee gets it set up, EE has all the options I need to make my content look absolutely beautiful. My website is easy to read and navigate, and everything has a coordinated look, because Taughnee has set up all the templates to fit together.

Taughnee, the social networker. Then Taughnee showed me the social networking tools she could add to the site that she thought would help build my customer base for the farmers’ market—and attract current shoppers to use the website more frequently. (First, I should disclose that I was a complete neophyte to social networking tools on the internet. Except for email, I was completely in the dark about things like blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter), photograph-sharing (Flickr), video-sharing (YouTube), and RSS feeds. I was sending a weekly email newsletter to my almost 1,000 subscribers using a terribly inefficient system.) Taughnee has revolutionized the way I communicate with my customers! First, she met with me for an hour to teach me how to use free applications on the internet (Twitter and Flickr). She then automatically piped my content from these applications directly into the website! I don’t need to know how to add micro-blog text to my website—her connection to Twitter automatically does that for me! And she designed my website to use Flickr, the photo program, to do the same thing with my photographs! I’m adding new photographs of food, market produce, and market scenes to the website almost daily—this system makes it SO SIMPLE! But not only is the micro-blog and photo information going to the website, it’s also being shared with the whole world of micro-bloggers, bloggers, and photographers out there! I’ve gotten so many new customers and folks interested in the farmers’ market already through these social networking outlets. I’ve really been surprised and impressed! I can tell that people are reading the website when they show up to the market asking for specific products from my blog and photos and micro-blogs!

Taughnee, the support system. As I dove headfirst into these new programs, applications, and networks (not without considerable trepidation), sometimes I found myself stuck, or confused, or anxious. A quick email to Taughnee, a phone call, or a note through Basecamp, and she was back to me in minutes (sometimes seconds) with help, solutions, and encouragement. What a fun way to dive into these new media: with someone close by to hold my hand and talk me through the tricky parts! And she was speedy to respond to my questions and comments about the website on her end, working hard to create the perfect site!

Taughnee, the inspiration. Learning how to navigate and use the internet this way has been truly a journey for me—and a really exciting one, at that. I never anticipated my passionate interest in adding new recipes, photos, and how-to videos to the website! I’ve had so much fun working on it, and I’m getting such a fantastic response from customers and website visitors—it’s incredibly rewarding! I’m reaching a much broader audience with my healthy recipes and information about the benefits of buying local, fresh food… it’s more than I had ever dreamed. Taughnee has shown me that I can be a big deal on the internet! That’s changed my life, and will change the Farmers’ Market, as well.

Taughnee, the rock-star web designer. I have so many more great things to say about working with and learning from Taughnee… please contact me if you have questions about her! Here’s the bottom line: give her the chance to build your website, and LET HER ROCK YOUR WORLD!!

Taughnee took my very simple idea for the site—a basic information bulletin board about the South Anchorage Farmers’ Market—and transformed it into an interactive site which not only attracts our farmers’ market customers, but enough visitors from all over the internet that the site could generate advertising revenue or attract a corporate sponsor! Moreover, what I initially thought would be a rather tedious chore of setting up a ho-hum, static website became a new and exciting way of communicating with customers that has been personally gratifying to me and incredibly beneficial to the farmers’ market!

-- Alison Arians
South Anchorage Farmers’ Market Reporter