The South Bedfordshire branch of the RSPCA is an independent animal welfare charity. They already had a website which was established in 2002 and had undergone a few redesigns over the years but it needed to be updated to take advantage of responsive web design techniques. It’s a popular site with about 3,000 visitors/month.
The old website also had no way for the stakeholders to update content on the website themselves. This meant information was frequently out-of-date, there was however a rudimentary method for updating the animals that were available for adoption.
The redesign and transfer into WordPress took around 2 weeks to complete. There wasn’t a particularly large amount of content to transfer across but it did need need restructuring to make this information easier to locate.
A Custom Post Type was built to facilitate the adding and categorisation of new animals for adoption. New image sizes were added to automatically create a range of images for use in the template when an image is uploaded through the WordPress media library.
A custom function was built onto the GravityForms plugin pre_render hook to make their adoption enquiry form more intuitive by dynamically replacing checkboxes with animal images.
This project is an ongoing one, as part of my volunteering role as a cat fosterer for the branch. Future additions include a better donation/sponsorship process, automated new animal email alerts and training to key staff within the branch on using and updating the blog and new animals.
