Websites for dog breeders and show dogs that are easy to update

Blog News and updates

9 April 2018

Websites for dog breeders and show dogs that are easy to update

Updating your website should be easy.

The easier it is to update your website, then you're more likely to update it!

Publishing fresh content will improve your visitor engagement. If you care about your website then your visitors will too. You will gain

  • repeat website traffic
  • credibility as a breed expert
  • loyalty and trust

Google will also index your website more frequently, giving you the opportunity to achieve higher search engine rankings.

Get started with Breedpost

Get us to build your website or transfer your current website!

A website builder to make beautiful websites for dog breeders

A good website builder should provide the tools for you to easily

  • publish content
  • edit, manage and delete content
  • upload images

You shouldn’t have to worry about page and text formatting or optimising images for the web.

This is time consuming and design skills are needed for a professional result.

When we were making Breedpost, we focused on providing an easy-to-update builder. Not only is Breedpost easy to use, we developed some customised features that apply specifically to dog breeders and exhibitors. These are

It was also important that you could update or change your website’s design easily to

  • select a design that complements their dogs and website content
  • ensure the design is modern and never looks out-of-date or old fashioned
  • change the design at anytime for a fresh look
A pedigree in a website using the Breedpost pedigree generator

Automatic pedigree generator on dog and litter pages

It is difficult to make pedigrees that look great on desktops, tablets and phones.

Pedigrees are wide and on narrow screens usually cause horizontal scrolling.

Formatting a web pedigree is difficult. 

Some methods for displaying pedigrees are scanned images, pdf versions and linking off-site to online pedigree generators.

There are many disadvantages of using these methods.

Breedpost designs are completely separate from the website content.

This means that you don’t need to format a pedigree as it's been done for you.

Our pedigrees are responsive to different screen resolutions, ie mobiles, tablets and desktops.

Developing a pedigree generator that's easy to update and accurate

We could have left that there and provided pedigree fields for each dog page for clients to complete in the website builder.

This would mean a separate field for the sire, dam, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents etc.

For a three generation pedigree that’s 14 fields, and a four generation equates to 30 fields to complete.

Now that’s on EVERY dog page. So if you have two dogs that are litter brothers, say for example, and you wish to display four generation pedigrees, you would need to complete 60 fields between the two dogs. Let alone, each of these pedigrees are duplicate content and you’re doing the same work twice!

Also, if a pedigree needs updating, maybe a dog has a new title and that dog appears in multiple pedigrees, you would need to update that dog’s title in multiple places.

Now, this is poor database management and a website builder is essentially a database.

Therefore we customised the CMS to include a pedigree generator so that pedigrees are managed using sound database principles.

Now who cares? Well you should because these are the benefits of using a relational database for outputting your pedigrees on your dog pages.

  • no multiple changes (update the dog in one place and all pedigrees will be updated automatically)
  • much less chance of pedigree errors (each pedigree dog is only stored in the one place)
  • easy for us to add new features (for example, display siblings on your web page or create a new report in your admin area)

If this sounds hard, it’s not. Breedpost is all about making it easy to manage and update content.

All you need to do is apply a sire and dam to each dogs’ page to start generating pedigrees. Then you apply a sire and dam to the parents and so on for the grandparents and great grandparents.

Pedigrees will start to generate quickly, especially if you have similar lines in your pedigrees.

Litter announcements work the same way. To generate a litter pedigree, all you need to do is add the sire and dam to the litter page. The pedigree will display beautifully formatted and be mobile responsive.

Building a pedigree system was one of, if not, the most important functionalities that we developed for the Breedpost CMS. How could we build websites for dog breeders without an automatic pedigree generator?

A four generation pedigree in the Breedpost admin

Adding show results to dog pages and keeping a record

The dog show results system uses the same methodology as the pedigree generator. By that I mean that everything is related.

Relationships in the Breedpost dog show results system include

  • club (view all show results from that club over time)
  • judges (view awards given by an individual judge)
  • dogs (view show results for that dog)
  • critiques (view the dog critiques)

Displaying show results on your dog pages

When you set up a dog show, apply a dog to the show result and display it on your website, an automatic link is created on the dog’s page for that result.

This makes it much easier than opening a text editor, writing copy for a result and formatting it to display on a news page or an individual dog page. It also ensures your show result listing and the results page looks great as - yes, I’ll say it again - design is completely separate from content.

Individual show result pages

Each show result, if published to your website, has an individual show result page and includes

  • the dog’s awards
  • judges that gave each of the awards
  • image gallery to display photos from the dog show
  • a critique and the judge who gave the critique

Using show results as a reporting tool

So now we’ve published show results to the dogs’ pages and created individual dog show result pages. And it was easy! Remember no formatting or coming up with copy (the words).

This is also great for your website as you’re publishing more pages, keeping the content current, providing more information about each dog and therefore improving your online credibility as a breeder and show dog exhibitor.

Back to the database though! In your admin area, you are now building comprehensive information about the show careers of your dogs.

Breedpost provides you with a reporting dashboard where you can

  • look up each dog and view all their results
  • look up each dog and view their results by award
  • look up a judge and view the awards they have given your dogs

This becomes very powerful over time. The more data you enter, the more value you'll get from the show result and dog reporting in Breedpost.

YOU can decide whether to publish the show result or not onto a dog’s page. Some exhibitors may only publish big awards and some may publish everything.

Either way, if it were me, I would at least enter all of my dog show results into the system, so I could view the historical data over time using the Breedpost dog show result reporting system.

A litter page in the Breedpost admin with multiple albums, pedigree, text, date of birth and litter status

Publishing future and current litter announcements and keeping an online archive of past litters

I’ve browsed hundreds of purebred dog breeder and show dog websites and found many, if not most, are not kept up-to-date. That is, except for the puppy or litter sections.

I guess that’s because advertising upcoming and current litters is transactional information, where you are marketing to potential puppy buyers. 

Using our website builder, a litter page will provide you with

When your litter is born all you need to do is change the status (click a checkbox) from upcoming to current. And similarly when the pups are all gone all you need to do is change the status from current to past. This automatically moves the litter page into the past litter listing section. Easy!

Building a litter pedigree is also easy. Simply add a sire and dam to start building a pedigree using the same method as discussed previously for individual dog pages.

We’ve made it really easy to publish multiple photo albums on a litter page. This makes it easy to organise albums by date and/or by pup. And again, all formatting is done by the system to

  • save time
  • ensure images are web optimised
  • display the images and albums beautifully for all devices

The easiest way to create and update your breeder website

Let us help you with a website build or transfer! Great for those busy people who don't have time to upgrade their current site or don't have a website at all.

Publishing fresh content to keep your website current using our blogging platform

How does a blogging platform help dog breeders? It makes it much easier to post, organise and categorise news articles.

Many dog breeders list all their website news on one page and over time that page becomes just too long to read. Instead, a blog creates a listing of separate news article pages that are displayed in chronological date order.

In order to make it easier for visitors narrow down what articles they are most interested you can also create your own customised categories. A category listing page is then created, making it easier for visitors to quickly identify which articles they would like to read.

Each blog post has a related section where you can select dogs, litters, show results and other articles to automatically link to. This is very useful for visitors as it makes it easier for them to navigate throughout your website and in turn your visitor engagement will increase.

There should be more purebred dog breeders blogging about their breeds to engage website visitors and to promote purebred dogs as a whole.

A litter page on a Breedpost website template for breeders

Delivering quality designed websites for dog breeders

Now we build your website. Not because it’s hard to do, but the initial data entry and set up can be a bit labour intensive, depending on how many dogs you have. We can do it very quickly though, because we have had heaps of practice.

Once the website is built, you can select and change designs by clicking a button and the whole website will change. You can do this for all the available designs to determine which one you prefer.

Over time, website designs do become outdated and old. We are building new website designs all the time, to keep the websites look and feel modern all the time.

When choosing a platform to run your dog breeder and show dog website, take into consideration it’s fit for purpose, ease of updating and your total cost of ownership.

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Author: Janelle

Janelle is a Breedpost Founder, ex show dog exhibitor, Corgi owner and loves to build websites. She's a content management specialist, has a Master of Information Technology and Diploma in Web Development.

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