Portfolio - Hopalong Animal Rescue

Hopalong Animal Rescue

Location: Oakland, California

Industry: Non-profit animal rescue

Website: http://www.hopalong.org

Hopalong’s success in placing animals in homes has a great deal to do with the speed at which they can get their message out. The organization had been using their website to post animals for some time, but was limited by both their time and technical skills. Depending upon volunteers that knew HTML or their own time availability and limited HTML knowledge, Hopalog found enormous time gaps between taking homeless animals in and getting them onto the website for the public to view. At the same time, animals that had already been adopted remained on the site, misleading visitors and generating counterproductive work for the organization.

Additionally, the organization’s website was outdated. The site’s design was unappealing, the layout and flow was difficult to follow and the underlying code was neither cross browser compatible nor search engine friendly.

Hopalong needed to get animals on and off the site quickly and easily, bring more people to the site and do it all in less time.

Applied Web Vitals built a custom website for Hopalong with the organization’s challenges in mind. Integrating the Adobe Contribute content management system into the site platform, Hopalong is now able to maintain the site without needing to know HTML or other web programming languages. In addition, Adobe Contribute's ease of use allows the organization to quickly train non-technical volunteers to participate in website management.

Through detailed discussions with the organization, Applied Web Vitals mapped out a site structure to keep the animals front and center, while highlighting mission critical initiatives like fund raising and reporting.

The Hopalong website was built according to the latest search engine optimization techniques, with cross browser compatible and fully validated code.  CSS (cascading style sheets) was heavily incorporated for central control and design/content separation.

• Adobe Contribute Content Management System
• CSS centric code
• SSI (server side includes)
• Google Analytics
• Java Script

Hopalong's hands are no longer tied when it comes to updating their website. With the Adobe Contribute content management system in place, the organization makes up-to-the-minute site changes. As an added bonus, the CMS now preserves the site layout and design, saving Hopalong money on frequent professional development intervention.

Shortly after launch, Hopalong's new website experienced a new surge of traffic.  Previously restricted by poor code, the new site’s audience instantly expanded to include legacy browsers as well as the latest releases . . . and across all computer platforms. 

Within two months Hopalong’s website traffic had doubled from 300 to over 600 visitors per day.

The new site’s optimized structure allowed search engines to quickly index each and every page.  The updated content rich site not only increased in ranking, but its search relevance improved, enabling the target audience to find the site faster.

How exciting to wake up this morning and see the birth of our new Hopalong/SCR site!  We could not have done this without you and you have been such a pleasure to work with. The new site is wonderful and best of all it will help to adopt out animals faster so we can continue to save more!  Thanks again!!
- Jerri Meacham

Thank you so much for all you have done.  [The website] is looking great.  We are getting great feedback on it.  If you ever need a testimonial on your work, feel free to use me. 
- Sarah Cohan, Executive Director

Thanks again for getting this done for us so fast. [It] makes a difference in getting these kids moved.
- Paula Vlamings, Development Director