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.
Their three main goals within the project those were to provide a platform that is trusted by thousands, connect vulnerable animals across the UK to loving homes and to support local shelters.
Animal adoption has always been a blooming industry, with more people opting to regime rather than purchase from a private breeder. However the start of the Coronavirus outbreak 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 them to provide new homes for pets. Within the first few weeks of the pandemic in the UK, local shelters saw a significant rise in adoptions, in some cases almost double compared to what they were used to.
The current process for end-users was clumsy and somewhat disconnected. Users had to trawl hinders of separate sites to find suitable animals, and then the actual adoption process - from enquiry completion - was often cumbersome.
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 incorporating the latest web tools and technology, they strongly believe they can make the process of finding and adopting animals simple and fun.
For this project, we were able to start from the ground up, allowing us to design and build the platform with the end user in mind. Using the ASP.NET framework, we were able to create a secure, scalable website that could manage significant demand while remaining flexible for future growth.
We opted for the Umbraco CMS, a decision driven by its flexibility, user-friendly interface and ability to deliver fast, responsive websites. As Umbraco Gold Partners, our certified in-house developers ensured that the Animates website would be both efficient to develop and easy to maintain. One of our primary goals was to deliver a solid first-phase product quickly, setting the stage for seamless future upgrades.
Choosing Umbraco 8 made sense for the project because of its robust features and scalability. The platform’s built-in functionalities enabled us to focus on creating custom features that would meet Animates’ specific needs. Additionally, we designed with the future in mind, ensuring the site could easily scale as the business grows.
Other main features of the build include:
- Direct leads and Animal enquiries
- Integrated donations
- Back office management tools
- Search engine friendly and optimised
- Automated animal listings
- In-built sharing and following tools
Animates is a passion project which helps animals and the charities that support animal rescue in the UK. These charities often operate with limited resources, so Animates provides a platform with useful filtering, great user experience, live data, email updates and adoption enquiry forms that ensures all animals have equal opportunities to be seen by the public. We are passionate about helping animals across the UK find their fur-ever homes through our expertise in technology, solutions and business.