Our family joined the farm for the 2002 season, and we were very pleased with the variety and quality of the produce we received. When I found out that they had a under-utilized website, I volunteered to redesign it. The first version of the website can be seen below.
I gave it more of a "farmstand feel" by broadening the palette of colors,
adding the picture of vegetables in the header and using garden stakes
for the newly streamlined list of links on the left. The front page features a boxed list of
each week's harvest (with a background of carrots).
One of the pages under "About Our Farm" is a CSS-based photo gallery, allowing the user to mouseover a set of thumbnails and view each photo. The photo gallery code was adapted from one at CSSPlay.
In 2009 I brought the website into compliance with Rutgers University web standards – they require each page to have the Rutgers logotype banner, search link, and a copyright notice. Most of the University webpages use the red Rutgers logotype, but I found that they also offered a version in black, which worked much better in this design. I also changed the main color on the page – previously the header and sidebar backgrounds were orange; but I thought green looked better with the black banner and avoided a "Halloween" color scheme.
In 2010 the name of the farm was changed from the "Cook Student Organic Farm" to the "Student Sustainable Farm at Rutgers", so I redid the header and updated all the references to the name.
Links were added to the site for the farm's new Facebook group, created so the farmers could share information with the shareholders, and so that they could communicate with each other.
In this initial design, I reorganized the contents and placed the navigation links on the left, and added new sections for vegetable recipes and information about the current growing season.
I chose this background texture because of its resemblance to a plowed field, and set up a "logo" with the farm's name and a picture of the crops.