Maryland’s Best

A statewide program needed a website that showcases Maryland agriculture and keeps a directory of producers accurate without constant manual updates.

Maryland’s Best promotes over a thousand farms, markets and producers across the state. The program needed a welcoming, easy-to-browse website that celebrates local agriculture and helps residents find producers, recipes and seasonal events. Behind the scenes, keeping the directory current meant collecting details such as hours, products, ordering options and photos from each producer, then keeping them up to date over time. The site needed a secure, simple way for producers to manage their own information, and tools the in-house team could use to keep the site fresh on their own.

A complete website design and build, powered by a custom producer portal and directory system.

Website design and development. We designed and developed the full Maryland’s Best website in WordPress, covering everything from the homepage and producer directory to recipes, news and seasonal content. The visual design reflects the Maryland’s Best brand. The site is built on WPBakery so the team can edit pages visually, and it works well on phones and tablets.

Producer registration and account portal. Producers sign up through a custom registration form protected by Cloudflare Turnstile and a honeypot, and they agree to the program’s compliance terms, which are recorded with the date of consent. After signing up, they manage their listing from a Producer Information area in their front-end account. There they can edit hours, contact and social details, products and ordering types, and upload photos directly, without ever entering the WordPress dashboard.

Smarter directory and search. We extended the store locator with custom taxonomies for additional information, ordering types and proteins. We also added category-filtered producer lists and pre-filtered search pages, so visitors can go straight to the type of producer they’re looking for.

Content building blocks. A custom Producer Loop element for WPBakery displays filtered producers in a responsive slider. Featured Producer, Featured Recipe and What’s Happening shortcodes let the team highlight seasonal content anywhere on the site without developer help.

Security, data and training. We tuned Cloudflare’s firewall so the site’s own tools keep working while bot protection stays in place on the registration form. We built a clean data export that turns producer records into a spreadsheet-ready format. We also wrote a branded site administrator guide so the Maryland’s Best team can confidently manage the site themselves.

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• WPBakery
• Advanced Custom Fields Pro
• Custom plugins
• Cloudflare Turnstile
• Cloudflare WAF