Jamestown Farmers Market
Jamestown Farmers Market is more than a market. Through comprehensive and far-reaching programming, they ensure that everyone in and around Jamestown, NY can access fresh and local food. To that end, they host weekly farmers markets, mobile markets, community dinners, collaborative programs with partner organizations, offer food boxes, host a community garden, and provide a platform to increase visibility for farmers and local businesses.
And it works! In 2025, Jamestown Farmers Market boasted an annual economic impact of $190,000. They awarded $23,000 in microgrants to local farmers and distributed more than 2,000 bags of food through their Food Prescription program. Incredible.
When Nick Weith, their Director of Food Access Programs, reached out to me to see if I could build them a new website, I couldn’t wait to get started. They had tried to work with a different developer, but the project stalled. Could I help them get over the finish line? Hell yes.
I’m a Chautauqua County native. I used to work at Jamestown Community College, and it was rare that I missed a mobile farmers market. This one was near and dear to my heart for sure. Read on to see how it all came together!
Kind Words
“Kristen built us a gorgeous site that's also highly functional and easy to navigate. She was simultaneously very open to our feedback and suggestions for changes while able to guide us to best practices for the organization of information, visual accessibility, and navigation. In came into the project mid-completion as a new hire with some new suggestions, and felt my feedback was not only encouraged but handled gracefully, despite some changes relatively late in the game. Kristen's continued support and training materials empower her clients to be able to manage and update their own sites with confident autonomy, for which we are grateful!”
Kristen Bentley
Community Engagement Coordinator
Jamestown Farmers Market
The old website
The old website was built on Squarespace some years ago. But, as Nick admitted, it had been built and later maintained by people who weren’t web developers or designers. It was very much a DIY project—and it showed.
Like many websites I replace, the old site had lots of technical issues. The color palette didn’t offer contrast high enough to pass accessibility checks. The main navigation was confusing. Every page had lots of information, but headings and paragraphs were mixed together. It was hard for both people and search engines to read and understand the site.
I knew we could make it easier for people to find what they were looking for. I also knew we could leverage their vibrant branding and fix the contrast issue. And if we could sprinkle in some new wording and create a clear information hierarchy for each page, we’d make the site easy to navigate and help connect people to the services they need.
For my nonprofit clients, working with me is an opportunity to rethink how they talk about their organization. What better time to refresh information, find new ways to illustrate impact, and add the context to better serve their community?
Here’s a look at where we started:
The web design process
Nick and I began the project working together. About halfway through, we were joined by Kristen Bentley, their new Community Engagement Coordinator. Nick brought a deep understanding of the farmers market and its programs, and Kristen came to the table with a ton of past marketing experience. Love it!
Not only did the Jamestown Farmers Market team have an awesome new logo, a vibrant color palette, and a font suite, they also had a strong sense of the organization’s “voice.” The team also had shiny new headshots for its staff and Board, plus a huge library of photos of their Winter and Summer markets. Be still my heart!
We had a huge opportunity to create a clear information hierarchy on the new site. To help the team get their minds around it, I created a wording outline that served as the scaffolding for our project. It included spots for headings, subheadings, and paragraph text. Importantly, the wording outline also specified button location and links to make sure we had the right calls-to-action in the right spots. Last but not least, the wording outline also contained some “free-form” areas where they could plug in some impactful statistics and snippets to showcase the scope of their work.
Once we had all of the photos, wording, and third-party code snippets, it was time to play!
I kept the base color palette simple—using just white, silver, and black—to give the site the contrast it needed to meet accessibility requirements. That gave me a really great, neutral foundation to play with. I used their logo mark as a standalone design element and used their brand green as an accent color.
Because their other brand colors don’t pass contrast checks, I decided to let photos do the talking. I curated a handful of vibrant, colorful close-up photos of fruits and veggies and used them liberally as edge-to-edge background images.
From there, the rest of the design fell into place. It includes:
As many photos as I could use! I wanted to showcase not only the beautiful produce and artisan items produced by farmers market vendors, but also show off the lovely human beings who make up the Jamestown community;
Clear calls-to-action and plenty of internal linking between pages to help draw visitors into the site and encourage them to explore all that Jamestown Farmers Market offers;
An on-site donations widget—no more clicking away to GiveButter to support their work;
Embedded widgets from MarketShare, the third-party app that JFM uses to manage vendors. The widgets make the site dynamic and reflect real-time updates to the vendors who attend the Winter and Summer markets;
Newsletter sign-up in the site’s footer, connected to their MailChimp account;
A robust events calendar with categories that enable the Jamestown Farmers Market team to pull relevant events onto specific pages;
A blog to showcase all that Jamestown Farmers Market offers. This was an important addition that will give search engines the content they crave and improve JFM’s visibility in search results;
Custom code to provide across-the-board styling for “info rows” around program eligibility, button hovers, and text links
Take a look at the Jamestown Farmers Market’s new website home page!
