Welcome to our home page
Home Page Farm makes good old-fashioned websites, raised with love on a farm in rural Germany. We use only the finest time-proven technologies to plant and nurture your presence on the internet. We work with you personally, with pride and care, to cultivate a home page that's hand-picked just for you.
With every step you deal with a person, not an automated system or an artificial intelligence.
First up, we decide what you want on your website and how to organise it. I can help you with that, with tips about what is usual or required on a website, what a visitor might want to see, and how a they might expect things to be arranged. You might like to work with a copy writer or usability designer, but you don’t have to. It’s a website, not rocket surgery.
Then we have to decide how it looks. I can help with design tips, you can provide mock-up images or example websites you like the look of, and we can work together to make your website look exactly as you wish. We'll need to think about how it looks on mobile phones as well as normal computers. We can go it alone, like they did in the wild 90s. or use a professional designer. I can recommend one, and I can either work directly with them, or from designs they provide.
I strive to make websites that are uncluttered and calm, free of distractions and attention-thieving tricks. Your website can have just what your vistors need to see, presented clearly and beautifully. But if you want to run riot, we can do that, too.
The next bit is the magic: I take the information you want to put online, organise it into pages, and make it look and work how you want. I will craft your website the way we did it in the 90’s — by hand, using a simple text editor. The way I’m writing this page right now, in fact. There will be no content management systems like Wordpress dictating how you structure and present your pages. You can do whatever you like, not just what you’re allowed to do by a huge company trying to provide as little as possible.
I use only standard, open and ethical technologies. I will make sure your pages are served quickly and efficiently, they adhere to modern accessibility standards as far as possible, configure them to give useful information to search engines, and give hints that ask bots and AI scrapers not to access your website. I will use only open, patent-free media standards for video, audio and images, where possible.
There will be no pop-ups asking your visitors to accept cookies, create an account, subscribe to a newsletter, or accept terms and conditions that nobody reads. I will not use weird, abusive tricks to make your website more prominent on search engines. If you want to be the top result on Google, you have to pay them, unfortunately. That's how they work.
Once all that is done, I’ll put your website online. Hosting — serving your web pages to users when they enter your URL or click a link to it — is free. I can register a domain name for you and configure everything, or configure everything using a domain name you’ve already registered. If I am responsible for the domain name, I will make sure it stays registered. You will be responsible for paying the fees for domain name registration and renewal.
My service is not for everyone. If you're expecting thousands of visitors every day, or want hundreds of pages, then this isn't the way to do it. I am an artisan making small-batch websites by hand.
I will only work with people who share my values.
I value things created by humans, even if they are a bit crap
I value human rights and things created by humans, even if those things are a bit crap. That means I will only work with people who reject the use of generative AI and NFTs. I will only work with nice people. I am a little suspicious of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If you are making claims that your product or service will improve someone's health or well-being, or otherwise have a measurable positive effect on the world, I would like to see evidence for those claims. I prefer dogs to cats, but I won't let that stand between us if you're really into cats. My favourite Rittersport is Zartbitter, but they're all pretty tasty.
I like to work with good people doing good things. People who work for the good of their community or society as a whole, people creating things to enrich our lives, and people who want to share harmless nonsense with the world. My prices are set to reflect the fact that these people often don't make a lot of money themselves. Doing good things doesn't pay well.
In the early days, websites were more like documents than applications. They were a little interactive, in a very basic way. Web 2.0 was the name given to the next generation of websites, that used a few tricks to make websites look and behave a bit like an interactive application you installed on your computer or phone.
I create websites the original way
A Web 2.0 application is expensive to create and host, can be unreliable and insecure, is slow to load, and runs slowly for people with older technology. The big companies have huge teams creating such websites, making sure they work pretty well for most people. Although I've got a lot of experience creating such websites, that's not what this is about. A showcase doesn't need to be like an application, and so I create websites the original way. There have been quite a few great additions to web technology since the 90s, that are nothing to do with app-like websites, and I use those too. I call it Web 1.1 - the web we wanted.
This means I won't create a website with an automated online shop, a forum, a booking system, or anything like that. There are already brilliant ways to create such things out there, they are usually reasonably priced, and are much more likely to provide everything you need than I would make. I can usually integrate these applications into a website that I create, and sometimes it can look rather seamless. Think of a Homepage Farm website as your business card and brochure to tempt people in, and the other stuff as the way you interact with customers. They are quite different needs, in the end.
The best bit of all this is that you pay for work, rather than paying rent
. You only pay to create or change your website. There are no ongoing hosting fees. Once your website is done, it'll be online forever, for no extra charge.
I charge €35 or £30 an hour. You can pay in either currency. How many hours it takes to create your website varies hugely, depending upon:
The minimum time is 2 hours, and additional time is charged in half-hour increments. Two hours is enough to create a one or two page website, in the best-case scenario: you already know what you want to put online; you have a good idea of how you want it to look, and it's not incredibly fancy; you can provide me with everything I need; and I'm just slotting everything into place and putting it online.
Assuming the design of your website doesn't vary much from page to page, additional pages don't take much more time. Occasional small edits to existing pages (correcting a typo, updating a link, changing an image) are free. More significant changes to existing pages are charged at the normal rate, and normally won't be more than half an hour.
Think of me as something like a carpenter, who makes a chair, which belongs to you forever
I acknowledge this is more complicated than you're used to. I cannot give you three simple price plans with the middle one temptingly highlighted as the most popular. I provide a bespoke service. Think of me as something like a carpenter or an artist. The benefit for you is that once the work is done, you pay no more, unless you want significant alterations to it. The website belongs to you forever, like a chair or a portrait painting created by other artisans. Hosting comes for free, but you can take your website away and host it elsewhere, ask someone else to work on it, whatever you wish. The idea is that you're paying me to create something, and once it exists, you do not have to pay for it to continue to exist, which is increasingly the norm for digital services and applications.
The best route to more clarity is to get in touch with me - I'm happy to provide a free quote. Either tell me what you want and I'll tell you the price, or tell me how much you can pay and I'll let you know what you'll get for that.
Hello, I’m Ben. I’m not really a farmer. I’m an old-school web developer, starting from the very first days of the World Wide Web in the early 90’s, through the first dot com boom in the late 90’s, and all the technology developments since, which have led us to an internet that’s completely dominated by huge, awful companies.
The web was beautiful, and a little bit utopian
It wasn’t meant to be like this. The World Wide Web was founded upon principles of a distributed network of interlinked pages which anyone could access and add to. It was beautiful, and a little bit utopian. It was invented by a visionary at CERN, who wanted a way to share information about their physics research with the world. It wasn't meant to be a way to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few nasty men.
The original ideals of the Web have been demolished in particular by social media companies, who lure us in by our desire for an audience, but who only provide that audience if we pay. Businesses and individuals feel they have no choice but to be present on these websites - I've never heard of a business owner who is enthusiastic about having to use social media.
You don’t need Instagram.
You need me
The truth is that an ordinary old-fashioned website is probably all most companies and organisations need. Most of your customers come from word of mouth, friends, family, direct contact, recommendations and so on. What you need is a showcase, a shop front, a place to to say what you have done, what you can do, and how. You don’t need Instagram for that. You need me! Social media can only ever give you a one-size-fits-all presence on the Web. Everyone looks the same, everyone is the same. Likewise off-the-shelf website creation tools like Wordpress. An experienced web developer like me can create a unique and tailored website that looks and works exactly how you want it - with no extra junk.