Animates came to life at the end of 2020, after 2 years of careful thought, strategic planning and building.
They were inspired and humbled by the amazing work that goes on day to day by animal charities and wanted to play their part to help.
The team at Animates wanted to showcase their three main goals within the project those being:
- Be Trusted: To ultimately provide a platform that is trusted by thousands.
- Dedication: They knew that there were thousands of vulnerable animals across the UK who needed their help to connect with the people who will be able to help them the most.
- Supporting Local Shelters: The overwhelming generosity of Animates users constantly helps to support animals and shelters all across the UK, this allows them to provide more for the welfare of animals who are truly in need.
Animal adoption has always been a blooming industry, with more people opting to regime rather purchase from a private breeder. However, since the start of the Coronavirus outbreak, it has promoted an increased number of people to start opening their homes to a new pet.
With a greater amount of people having to spend more time at home, it has inspired many to provide new homes for pets. Within the first few weeks of the pandemic here in the UK (March 2020) local shelters were seeing a significant rise in adoptions since lockdown started, in some cases almost double compared to what they were used too.
Compounding these issues, the current process for end-users is clumsy and somewhat disconnected. Users have to trawl hinders of separate sites to find suitable animals, and then the actual adoption process - from enquiry completion - is often cumbersome. Animates hopes to solve this problem.
Already in development, Animates' central aim is to help the plight of thousands of animals in the UK which need to find a loving home, all in a single, centralised, and easy-to-use platform.
By incoporating the latest web tools and technology, that leverage the ever-growing power of social and community, Animates strongly believed they could make the process of finding and adopting animals simple and fun, along with the support of the UK's shelters in the incredible work that they already do.
As this was a brand new project for us we were able to start completely from scratch, allowing us to build and design is solely with the customers that would be using the site at the forefront of our minds.
Built on the ASP.NET platform, this allowed us to build a secure web sire that would be capable of managing a huge demand. Using the platform also allows us to scale accordingly.
We also chose to build the platform on the Umbraco CMS, this is due to its overall flexibility of use, ability to display on engaging, reactive yet still speedy website. Here at Cold Banana we are Umbraco Gold Partners, our in house certified developers ensured when building Animates they considered two very important factors during the build.
The first, was getting a first phase product built as quickly as possible, in a way that set the team up for easy and efficient future upgrades. Umbraco 8 was the logical choice, as we could use the inbuilt features to bootstrap the core functionality bespoke to the Animates project. Additionally, we always like to build with the future in mind, and knew that Umbraco is a framework that could easily be scaled alongside the business.
Other main features of the build include the following:
- Direct leads and Animal enquiries
- Integrated donations
- Back office management tools
- Search engine friendly and optimised
- Free for all users and shelters
- Automated animal listings
- In-built sharing and following tools
The Future
Animates officially launched in 2020, so it's still in its very early stages. We are very proud to have seen this project grown from just an idea and concept to a functioning, reliable website. Animates hopes to keep going as a digital platform, to host as many shelters as possible as well as exploring and developing opportunities with the wide range of organisations operating in the animal welfare space.
"Animates is a passion project which helps animals and the charities that support animal rescue in the UK through a seamless, user friendly website. With these charities having limited resources we provide equal opportunities for animals to be seen by the public through this additional platform with useful filtering, great user experience, live data, email updates and adoption enquiry forms. We are passionate about helping animals across the UK find their fur-ever homes through our expertise in technology, solutions and business." - Abigiail Norris, Co - Founder