Sunnyfields win Hantsweb 2005 Award 

On 12th March 2006 Ian Nelson was presented with the 2005 Best Rural Website. The awards are coordinated by Hampshire County Council. Now in their fourth year, the awards celebrate excellence in website design, accessibility and service. The awards are open to businesses and organisations resident in either Hampshire or the Isle of Wight.

The original awards were inaugurated in 2002 and were a resounding success. Since the first ceremony, the awards have been held on an annual basis, growing on the successes of the previous years. These awards have highlighted the best in online services to the local communities as well as benefiting the interests of those who have participated.

Nominations for the awards are assessed by a panel of independent judges with expertise and experience in their chosen field. They look for good practice, accessibility, ease of use, relevance, and, of course, great design.

The Sunnyfields website was originally written by Charles Merfield when he worked on the farm. In 2005 the site was upgraded by Giedrius who hails from Lithuania. Giedrius whose day job for Sunnyfields is packing, delivery driving and running our Notting Hill and Marylebone Farmers’ markets stands every weekend with his wife Diana.

The website has therefore developed quite slowly and from an internal hands-on basis. The largest change for the website and for the home delivery service as well was….the addition of on-line ordering. Roger Munford (Parus Software) a long term friend, customer and computer programmer who also writes all our home delivery and shop software got to work on our on-line ordering with an automatic link to our internal software. We think it’s excellent and we have seen many of our “existing older” customers change over to on-line ordering.

After the awards ceremony Ian Nelson said “its great to receive an award for your website, the scale of the Hantsweb awards and the support that it has received just shows you how important your websites are. I’m off back to the farm to look at how we can improve our site further”