The FW team has had an interesting week listening to our customers - farmers. Last Friday, a group of livestock producers spent a day in the FW office in Sutton, Surrey to tell us what they thought of our products and how we could improve what we do. As always, it was invaluable feedback, particularly in learning how we can mix and match content in the magazine with the website offering. Space in print is pretty restricted these days but we have this limitless resource with www.fwi.co.uk and the key is to use it and our time wisely on the things that farmers find most useful.
One of the main lessons for me from this meeting was the need to "keep it simple" and spell out what things mean for the ordinary farmer at grassroots. The guys told us that they want the bigger picture stuff in terms of industry news and developments but we could do more to explain how this impacts on Joe Bloggs the farmer, depending on his/her type of enterprise. I guess we already knew this but it's important to be reminded of it. So for example on the issue of the blue tongue vaccine, more detail on the likely costs and implications for a typical beef producer and not just the topline on what it costs the whole industry. Obvious really, but sometimes you get so close to the story that it's easy to miss the basics.
Yesterday we also had fantastic feedback from web users on early proposals for changes to our site. Researching audience needs before we revise the products is absolutely key. So we've conducted a series of face to face, in depth interviews with typical website users to find out their attitudes to the internet, to fwi itself and to our plans to update and improve it. We call it useability research and it included business farmers, an agronomist, a farming student and someone in an environmental role. What did we discover? Well most of these people are frequent users of fwi and other websites so they are pretty web savvy, clued up and very clear about what they want and don't want. They've given us a fantastic steer on how to move the site forward - making it easier to access, more relevant and an essential tool. I won't say any more at this stage because it's such early days and I don't want to give anything away to competitors. Suffice to say that we were pleased by the wholly positive reaction from users to the changes we are looking to make. More details later. Website traffic has hit record levels in the last couple of months so we are reassured that we're doing something right but there is always a lot of room for improvement.
My blog is about encouraging customers - farmers and advertisers - to talk to us about everything we do. So don't hesitate to get stuck in and have your say..... good and bad comments...... we need to listen and will respond. Comments please?