Setting up an animal shelter website

  • Unknown's avatar
    tierfreund11 · Member ·

    Hi all,
    I am totally inexperienced but would like to help an animal shelter to set up a website to facilitate animal adoptions. Following features would be required:
    – a template in which you can easily upload the information and pictures about new dogs/cats for adoption
    – a filter option (e.g. size, age etc of the animal)
    – when entering the website a user should be able to chose his language (Spanish, German, English)

    Can anyone tell me whether it is feasible to set this up without any knowledge/IT skills? What would be the costs to set the website up and maintain it?

    I know that this is a big project but unfortunately the animal shelter is based on donations and does not have any budget to get this done professionally, so I’m just trying to help…

    Thanks in advance for any advise! :-)

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @tierfreund11, language-switching and advanced filtering aren’t built into WordPress itself, so you’ll need a plugin for that. You may also consider hiring a developer to help you get it all started — or even asking in your community to see if someone can help — then you can maintain it on your own as you like. Here’s how to get in touch with your local WordPress user’s group:
    https://www.meetup.com/topics/wordpress/

    You’ll also want to decide whether to host here with us, or whether to maintain your own copy of WordPress with another host. We provide maintenance, security, and support for the sites hosted here on our servers:

    WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

    But you would need a Business Plan for a site that has plugins, since that makes maintenance, security, and support a bit more complicated.

    If needed, for now, you could get started with a simpler site (maybe putting different types of animals in categories), then add more features as you can.

  • Unknown's avatar
    tierfreund11 · Member ·

    Hi @supernovia,

    Many thanks for your reply and your help. In the mean time I have set up a basic website to get started. How can I now add subtopics (dogs, cats etc) to the menue tab (animals for adoption)?

    Do you know how much the plug-ins will cost to have a template to upload new animals, language switching option and advanced filter options?

    Many thanks for your help!

  • staff-zinnia · Staff ·

    Hey there –

    There are several different parts of a website that you can link in to the menu. You could create “cat” and “dog” pages, or an “adoption” page. When you need to remove or update that page you’d click on My Sites – Site – Pages – Edit.

    Another option would be to use categories. I think that’s the more common approach. With this option, every post you categorize as “cats” would then be listed when someone clicks on the “cats” category from the menu.

    Does that make sense?

    Check out this page: https://wordpress.com/support/category-pages/

  • Unknown's avatar
    tierfreund11 · Member ·

    Thanks staff-zinnia,
    I have now arranged dog/cat sub categories on the main menue.

    I have done more research on the plug-in for a template to upload animals for adoption and filter them accordingly, the plug-in is called pet manager. However, it is available in English only and does not contain all fields I need. How can I set up/buy a similar plugin and customise the fields?
    Unfortunately no one is responding in the plugin help forum…

  • staff-blorbo · Staff ·

    Since using plugins at WordPress.com requires a paid Business plan https://wordpress.com/support/plugins/#using-other-plugins I recommend asking over at https://wordpress.org/support/forum/miscellaneous/ instead where you’ll find more folks with more experience with more plugins for recommendations. :)

    To clear up any confusion, WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two different entities: https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/

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