WordPress is the most ubiquitous content management system on the Internet, accounting for more than 40% of all websites. Since the software is open source (and therefore free to use) it’s an obvious favorite of ever-cash-strapped nonprofits.
If you are setting up a website for an animal shelter, the out-of-the-box installation of WordPress will take you pretty far, though you may still need to acquire some plugin-software for features such as payment processing (if that’s a feature of your website).
A need that is specific to animal shelters is the need to display the animals available for adoption. Although it would technically be possible to meet this need using standard features of WordPress, the frequency with which animals come and go make it a virtual necessity to have some kind of bespoke system to manage this information.
Many shelters already manage their animal information in a kennel management system such as PetPoint or AnimalsFirst. In that case, the challenge is to interface with those systems so that it’s not necessary to keep track of additions and changes in more than one place. PetPress was designed to provide just such an interface. If you use a back-end system supported by PetPress, just follow the PetPress setup guide and you should be up and running in minutes!
If your shelter does not use a kennel management system, PetPress offers a featured called “PetPress Data Manager” that enables you to create, update, and delete animals from your roster(s) without the need for a back-end system. Instructions on how to use PetPress Data Manager are located elsewhere on this site.
Please note that Data Manager is not intended as proper kennel management software. Depending on regulations in your area, you may have legal obligations regarding record keeping and reporting on your animals that go beyond what PetPress supports. However, as far as managing the basic need to show animals on your website is concerned, PetPress Data Manager is all you need.
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