Penny's Ark: a rescue website that updates itself and keeps every penny

A dog rescue has two jobs a website has to support, and most websites support neither. It has to show the dogs who need homes, accurately and right now. And it has to take donations without a payment company skimming money that was meant for vet bills.

Penny's Ark rescues dogs from the kill shelters of Romania and rehomes them in the UK, and when they came to us both of those jobs were being done the hard way. Dogs were updated by hand. Donations went through a platform that took a cut of every gift. The site looked tired, and it was doing none of the actual work.

What we built

We rebuilt it on WordPress with a bespoke theme, then did the part that mattered: we connected it to how the rescue actually runs.

• The adoptable dogs update themselves. The site reads straight from the rescue's animal management system, so when a dog is added, changed or rehomed in the software they already use, the website just knows. No double entry. No dog still listed as looking three weeks after they found a sofa.
• Donations keep 100%. We moved giving onto a platform that takes zero fees, so every pound the public donates reaches the dogs. For a small charity that is not a detail, it is vet bills.
• Sponsor-a-dog pages build themselves from the same live data, so supporters can back a specific dog without anyone lifting a finger.

The hard part

Anyone can put a database on a web page. The work was making a charity's live, slightly messy operational data feel like a calm, considered, genuinely lovely site, the kind that makes you trust the people behind it, while underneath it quietly pulls from rescue software and routes money with no middleman.

For a charity, a website that updates itself and keeps every penny is not a nice-to-have. It is more dogs homed per pound. That was the whole brief, really.

We build charity websites like this: warm on top, real systems underneath.