Case study · FurEver Friends
Giving every animal a home, not just a place.
A complete redesign and rebuild of a volunteer-run, no-kill rescue. I replaced a dated WordPress site with a custom adoption and foster directory that puts dogs in front of the people who want to meet them.
Overview
Small rescue, big hearts.
FurEver Friends has no shelter. Every dog lives in a foster home until adopted. The team had grown to 188 foster homes and over 9,000 lifetime adoptions, but the site had run on the same template since 2014.
The goal: a modern, trustworthy site the volunteers could run themselves, built to put adoptable dogs in front of the people looking for them.
The old site.
The problem
Three things weren't working.
Dogs had no real home on the site
No dedicated, browsable space for adoptable dogs.
Traffic wasn't coming in
A dated template, weak SEO, and no reason to come back.
Visitors weren't converting
Next steps were buried in dense paragraphs.
Research
What I learned.
With four months and a team of one, research had to be high-signal and low-overhead. I leaned on the founder and a few volunteers, and reviewed rescues like Wings of Rescue and Animal Care Sanctuary.
"We had to text photos to a volunteer to get a dog 'added.' There was no system."Volunteer
"Every dog post on Facebook ended up on our website. Birthday photos, GoFundMes, you name it."Tony Ferrari · Co-founder
Pain points
A site that loved dogs but didn't know how to show them.
Information overload
Long copy with no headers or callouts.
No dog gallery
Dogs lived in a Facebook feed with no filters.
No per-dog page
Nothing to bookmark, share, or revisit.
Noisy bulletin board
Every post competed with the dogs.
Final screens
A clear path from hello to home.
Reflection
What I'd carry into the next one.
Constraints sharpen decisions.
I dropped a Petfinder API integration, taught myself WordPress, and shipped a more focused site.
Color should do real work.
Navy builds trust, orange marks the main action, and white space gives people room to think.
A real org isn't a portfolio piece.
I traded high-fidelity complexity for a tool the volunteers can run. Given the choice, I pick useful.
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