About Us

HorseOptions.com is owned by Robert and Linda Shurtleff, who live just outside the city limits of Minneapolis, MN. Lin is the developer/webmaster and Rob takes care of marketing the site. They currently own 4 horses, 3 of which are pictured on the main page of HorseOptions.com.

About Lin:
"I have always been involved with horses. I was fortunate enough to grow up on a dairy farm. My sister had a horse and she would take me for rides when I was little. When I was 6, my parents surprised me with a pony named Misty. She was a typical ornery Shetland pony who gave me my first introduction to a fast and furious meeting with the ground. However that didn't knock out my love for horses. Since her, I've had the pleasure of owning a Welsh gelding (Bucky), a grade mare (Ginger), a Quarter Horse gelding (Jack), an Arabian mare (Gypsy), a Peruvian Paso gelding (Brio), a Swedish Warmblood/Thoroughbred gelding (Sebastian) and my current horse, the big black draft cross (Oreo) who is at the top of every page on HorseOptions.com.

Throughout the years, I've spent a considerable amount of time browsing through various horse classifieds websites. There have been features I've liked and disliked about the various sites, as well as features or categories that I thought were missing all together. Being a relatively organized person, I really disliked the sites that were hard to navigate and had cluttered pages. I finally decided to just go ahead and develop my own website. I found a basic template I liked and then I learned HTML code and customized the rest of it to our liking.

My goal was to make the site as user friendly as possible, as well as visually appealing. However, with that said, I'm also a very detailed person. I wanted to provide fields in each category so the sellers could easily provide as much information as possible to their prospective buyers. The buyers likewise have quite a bit of information at their fingertips that might not otherwise have been provided to them.

It seems like I'm thinking up little things here and there every day to add to or modify the website. If you think of anything that you would like to see on the site, please feel free to let me know."

About Rob:
"I became involved with horses when I married Lin. While I wouldn't say I have the same passion for horses that Lin has, I find working with a horse to be a very enjoyable way to pass time. My first horse, Chief, was a retired ranch gelding that just about anyone could ride. He had the start of arthritis in his back leg when we bought him, but that was ok with me since I needed something dependable to learn on. When the arthritis became too bad to do heavy riding, I bought Red (the Thoroughbred pictured on the main page). Looking back, he was probably a little too much horse for me to move up to, but after spending a considerable amount of time doing ground work with him, we found a way to make it work. I've learned more from working with Red than if I had gotten another dead broke horse.

It's been a fun learning experience working with Lin and getting HorseOptions.com up and going. I've been going to as many horse-related websites and online networking groups that I can think of to promote our site. It been very interesting placing ads for our site on other horse classifieds websites...some are maddening in how difficult it is to place an ad and/or navigate their site. After placing the number of ads that I have on other websites, some of the things that I appreciate most about our site is that ads are live as soon as they're placed, it's easy to find a specific ad thanks to our advanced search feature and those search results are sortable. Our site is also not cluttered with banner ads from outside vendors or Google ad links. In addition, you know the ads on our site are current. If you see an ad that's older than 60 days on our site, it's because the seller has renewed it, which tells you the item is probably still available. Last, but not least, if you have a question about something, we will get back to you right away and not days or weeks later as I've experienced first-hand with other sites."

In short, we're sure you'll add HorseOptions.com as one of your favorite horse classifieds websites.