KNOX — Do rural areas like the Hilltowns need some help with their “web presence”?

Jonathan Lane, 37, thinks they do. A self-described homesteader — “We’re not looking to live off the grid, but we want to be as self-sufficient as possible,” he says — Lane is looking for  a way to get back to the land while pulling in some income using his skills as a software developer and website designer.

He launched Helderberg Webworks this summer, two years after he and his wife, Rachel, bought an “updated old farmhouse” with a pond and a few acres in Knox and moved there from Schenectady. She engineers control systems for power plants at General Electric.

Lane thinks there are  a lot of entrepreneurs in the Hilltowns — smaller farms, craftspeople, and businesses —  that could use what he’s offering: professional website creation or redesign.

Though he expects to find clients “off the Hill,” too, his main focus in on “the beautiful and resourceful Helderberg Hilltowns,” as his own website puts it.

He likes the sense of community he finds among people who, like him and his wife, are looking for a simpler more sustainable life: growing their own food, raising their own animals, and living as much as possible off the land’s abundance.

He likes that he and his wife were able to purchase one-quarter of a cow from a neighbor recently. He likes the yaks another neighbor has. He likes beekeeping and the fresh eggs their own chickens produce and the thought of adding turkeys next year to their poultry.

He and his wife like the fact that “every meal we have has something that comes from our own land or from our neighbors’ land.”

Lane grew up on what he describes as a “hobby farm”; his wife was raised in a non-rural setting. Both are now committed to Knox. Geothermal energy and solar panels are among the updates they made to their old farmhouse.

A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Lane was well-prepared for a career path that first took him, for eight years, to mySmartSimulations, a Saratoga Springs company that creates interactive simulations of surgical procedures for makers of surgical instruments and others; he was a developer and director at the e-learning company.  Four years at Amsterdam Printing, as senior front-end website developer, followed.

“I got to the point that my work didn’t seem fulfilling anymore,” Lane says. Now he’s on his own, prospecting for business among his Hilltown neighbors. He says he likes the idea of working with a variety of people on a variety of websites.

“I know a sheep farmer,”  he says, “who’s selling through word of mouth now. People aren’t finding out about it.”

A good website can change that, he believes.

“Then too,” he says,”“there are people who have a website but it may be very outdated, one that was created 10 years ago and looks that way, and that is not at all user-friendly.

“Or, people may have a website that looks fine to them and seems easy to use,” he says, “but a user has  to go searching on it to find what he’s looking for.

“Is it user-friendly? That’s the most important thing to ask about any website,” he says.

Something else to keep in mind, Lane points out, is  that “over half of all web searches now are made on mobile devices. This makes it imperative that websites should be created to be responsive to whatever device is being used.”

Helderberg Webworks  also offers help with search-engine optimization — the practice of setting up a website so that the most popular search engines find it easily, securing  it a high position on the search-results list;  A/B testing in which two versions of a website are tested among users, and social media consulting.

Lane is getting  the word out about his new business and services through emails and through his own website at helderbergwebworks.com. He can be reached at [email protected].

A vice president of the Helderberg Hilltowns Association, he’s also relying on a tried-and-true method  of communicating: gatherings of Hilltown neighbors.