NON-PROFIT
HAPPY CATS HAVEN
Client Name
Happy Cats Haven
Client Since
2022
Industry
Non-Profit
Our Process
Happy Cats Haven rescues homeless Colorado cats & kittens and finds them loving forever homes. We partnered with Happy Cats at the start of 2022 to overhaul their existing site. While the previous website had served them well for many years, it had become outdated and difficult to maintain.
Paint Point: Happy Cats needed their adoptable cats to be front and center while making it easy for users to give in other ways.
AE Services
Platform
Website Development
SEO Foundational
Management
Solutions
Platform Design & Development
The initial challenge when approaching this project was how large the previous site was due to years of blog/resource content, hundreds of pages and over ten thousand cat photos! The primary goals were to simplify the user-flow and and ensure the site loaded much quicker. The simplified user-flow was achieved by streamlining the sitemap and utilizing a mega-menu in the design with clear categories for the user to navigate. Site speed was improved through proper image sizing and optimization as well as code improvements.
From a design perspective, the Happy Cats brand features a soft color palette. This is intentional as Happy Cats is true to its name! The website design needed to reflect the calm and content environment of the shelter, with rotating cat photos being the real appeal!
SEO Foundational
A website overhaul should always be approached with intention, as changing or reducing the number of pages can have a negative impact on search engine rankings if not handled correctly. Our first priority on the SEO front was to mitigate traffic loss that would naturally stem from drastically reducing the sitemap for the benefit of user-experience. From there, we focused keyword research on those in the Colorado Springs area who are actively looking to adopt, donate or volunteer with an animal shelter. Keyword intent is especially important in the case of non-profits as there is typically not an ad budget to reach those actively looking to adopt or donate. Beyond optimizing the core pages of the site, we also trained the Happy Cats team to optimize content as they regularly add “Happy Tales” and resources to the site.
Hosting
Armada Digital provides Happy Cats with secure web hosting and provides an avenue to help with occasional design or content updates through our ticketing system.