Amanda Owen AKA The Yorkshire Shepherdess
Discover a little bit about Amanda
Amanda Owen is The Yorkshire Shepherdess: a hill-farmer, mother of nine, writer and photographer. Amanda leads an extraordinary life and it’s become the subject of the Channel 5 documentary series Our Yorkshire Farm. Living 1,800ft above sea level in a remote farmhouse, she and her husband juggle farm life ‘at the sharp end’ with raising a small tribe of children (alongside a large flock of 1,000 sheep).
Amanda is unfazed by most challenges; she takes tough working conditions, isolation and extreme weather in her stride - but as a self-confessed ‘techno-phobe’, she was daunted by the prospect of redesigning her ‘rubbish’* website. A chance meeting with her regional it’seeze consultant gave Amanda the opportunity to hand over this task - and tick one important thing off her never ending ‘to do’ list.
* we didn’t say this, her husband Clive did!
A website for all seasons
Amanda’s website needed to do several different things - and do them all brilliantly. She has many talents and a fascinating tale to tell; she also has some very real practical requirements from her website, which helps her run the different strands of her business.
Unfortunately, her existing site was a little like a classifieds listing for her holiday lets and did next to nothing to promote her growing Yorkshire Shepherdess brand. With 90K Twitter followers and a growing number of enquiries for public appearances to respond to, Amanda needed a central hub to tie everything together and make it easier to manage. So, armed with Amanda’s amazing photography and a list of ‘must-haves’, our it’seeze designers went to work.
We created a warm, welcoming website with spaces devoted to Amanda’s life, her farming, her writing, her photography, her holiday accommodation business and her public speaking activities. It all combines to provide Amanda and her amazing story with an authentic online voice.
Keeping it personal
Amanda’s website is a window on her world. it’seeze designer Jodie let Amanda’s photography lead the way when it came to designing the look of her site. A full width design creates an open, modern look but muted purple hues and small illustrations add warmth and personality, hinting at a more traditional lifestyle.
I’ve used large fading images to really showcase Amanda’s amazing photographs. They set the feel for the site straight away and welcome visitors in to Amanda’s beautiful rural life.
Jodie - it’seeze designer
Practical support at every step
The Yorkshire Shepherdess website gets an average of 20K page-views each month (the figure shot up to 100K during the four weeks when Our Yorkshire Farm aired on Channel 5). While it’s always important for a website to look great, this one needed to be more than simply a showcase. It’s a complete, easy to navigate source of information and includes enquiry forms to help filter enquiries to the right place: pushing requests for public appearances to Amanda’s agent and accommodation bookings straight to her.
Amanda’s website is also incredibly easy to update thanks to our unique website editor, which means it will always look fresh, with relevant content, and can be adapted to her changing needs. Amanda has also recently decided to add functionality to enable online booking for her holiday home. This is something which is easily done with the help of the it’seeze team, who will provide support for the full lifetime of Amanda’s website, just as we do for every website we build.
What Amanda has to say
"For a number of years I had relied upon a very basic website. Living rurally and having a very poor internet connection meant that I personally was not an internet user. I was reluctant to spend money (and more importantly any of my valuable time) on my website."
"It was a chance encounter with my local website consultant that was a turning point. He persuaded me that I needed to think about how a new website could work for me, to make sense of my haphazard and disorderly systems and help me deal with the ever-increasing flow of enquiries and channel traffic. With his help, we were able to tailor a website that provided a better reflection of my emerging brand.
The site gives me a platform that is constantly evolving so always looks fresh and polished, visually beautiful and informative. It has certainly been instrumental in gaining me a wider customer/fan base. I can categorically say it has been pivotal in the advancement of my business. I can’t thank it'seeze enough for their guidance and proving to me that a website can be so much more than a standard template, and that first online impressions count."
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