Poultry Breeders & Suppliers List

One question that keeps coming up is “Where can I buy some chickens from?” We get asked that frequently on the poultry chat forums and I’ve had people contact me direct as well. With the best will in the world, I don’t know everything and usually re-direct these requests back to the forum.

I thought about this before Christmas and decided to put a list on the site of breeders so people could just look up online and contact someone local.

Once we have a few people onboard, I can split things up by country (England, Scotland etc) region (North West, North East etc) and finally by counties. Also, because of the way it’s set up, I’ll be able to provide separate lists for suppliers of hatching eggs etc

So, if you know a poultry breeder who would like a free advert can you point them to the Suppliers of Live Poultry & Hatching Eggs pages?

How I built the Suppliers of Live Poultry & Hatching Eggs pages

Initially I thought this would take a few hours, but like lots of jobs that you think will only take a couple of hours, it actually took a bit longer than the plan.

First, it’s obvious that if we have a lot of people listed then we need a way to narrow the area down. So I had to find a list of UK counties, which was harder and more complex than I expected. Then I linked this to the countries, England, Scotland, Wales and N Ireland and further attached the counties to regional areas like North West, South East etc.

By the time I’d finished, a day had gone. Still, it might come in useful for something else one day.

Christmas happened and I didn’t get any further but after I thought I could whip it out in a few hours, I’d done the hard part! Famous last words, next I had to do some research on what people were looking for. Did they want day old chicks? Point of lay pullets? Perhaps they were looking for ducks or quail. So various bits were created and fields created in the database to store them.

Now I’ve got something really powerful that can store thousands of breeders and, more importantly, it will be easy to find people (as long as they are listed!)

I know it will be useful. The first entries on the list were test information. You need to put something in to see what the end result will look like, it’s technically known as populating the database. I popped myself in, as Mr Test of Anytown, AnyStreet and (here I was a bit daft) my own telephone number.

Incredibly, within hours the telephone rang with a nice lady looking to buy a couple of laying hens. Talk about confusion. There’s me “I don’t sell hens” – “But you’re advertising that you do” – “Oh no I’m not!” – “Oh yes you are” It was getting like Punch & Judy until I realised I’d left the test data on the production version. Still, it proves people will notice it.

So, when you look at these 4 pages of the site, they took me nearly three days to make. If you’re a 25 year old programmer who could have knocked it out in half an hour.. be aware, in 30 years you won’t be quite as quick and competent.