Welcome to the world of dog breeding, where pedigree and purebred dogs are the primary focus. Dog breeders need to keep their websites up to date to attract potential buyers and showcase their breeding program. A poorly designed website can turn away potential customers and leave a negative impression. It is important to understand the value of updating your dog breeder website to a modern design.

First Impression Matters

Your website is (or should be) the first point of contact between you and potential puppy buyers. It is essential to make a good first impression. An outdated website can make your breeding program look VERY unprofessional. A modern website design can create a professional and trustworthy image of your breeding program.

Moreover, the website’s design should be user-friendly, easy to navigate, and visually appealing. A modern website design can achieve these objectives, helping you to attract more visitors to your website.

Updating your website can also help you stay ahead of your competitors. If your competitors have modern websites with better functionality, you may lose potential customers to them.

The Importance of Mobile Responsiveness

Today, an increasing number of people use mobile devices to browse the internet. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that your breeder website is mobile-friendly (responsive to all devices). A modern website design can help you achieve this objective. A mobile-responsive website can adjust to different screen sizes, ensuring that visitors have a seamless browsing experience regardless of the device they use.

Having a mobile-friendly website can also improve your website’s search engine rankings. Google has a mobile-first indexing policy, meaning that it uses the mobile version of your website to rank it in search results. Therefore, having a mobile-responsive website can help improve your website’s visibility in search results.

Updating your website to a modern design can help you achieve mobile responsiveness, ensuring that you don’t lose potential customers who browse your website on their mobile devices.

Improved User Experience

A modern website design can help improve the user experience (UX) of your kennel website design. A good UX can encourage visitors to browse your website for longer, increasing the chances of them becoming customers.

A modern breeder website design can include features such as easy navigation, clear calls to action, and a visually appealing design. These features can help visitors find the information they need quickly and easily, and make a positive impression, increasing the chances of them returning to your website in the future.

Moreover, a modern website design can help improve the loading speed of your website. A slow loading website can frustrate visitors, leading them to leave your website and look for what they need elsewhere (aka bounce). A modern website design can help improve the loading speed, ensuring that visitors have a seamless browsing experience.

Enhanced Security

Updating your website to a modern design can help improve its security. An outdated website design may have vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to your website. They can essentially take over your site, or wipe it out.

A modern website design can include security features such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, firewalls, and regular security updates. These features can help protect your website from cyber threats, ensuring that your website is safe for visitors to browse.

Better Integration with Social Media

Social media is an essential marketing tool for dog breeders. A modern website design can help integrate your website with social media platforms, ensuring that you can leverage their potential to reach a wider audience.

A modern dog breeding website design can include social media icons, allowing visitors to share your website’s content on social media platforms. This can help increase the visibility of your breeding program, leading to more potential customers.

Improved SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). A modern website design can help improve your website’s SEO, ensuring that it ranks higher in search results.

A modern kennel website design can include features such as clean code, responsive design, and fast loading speed, all of which can help improve your website’s SEO. Moreover, a modern website design can help you create high-quality content that is optimized for search engines, ensuring that your website ranks higher in search results for relevant keywords.

Cost-Effective Solution

Updating your website to a modern design can be a cost-effective solution in the long run. An outdated website may require frequent maintenance and repairs, leading to higher costs over time. It can also cause lower rankings and even penalties in the major search engines. This causes you to lose customers.

A modern website design can be built with scalability in mind, allowing you to add new features and functionality as your breeding program grows. Moreover, a modern website design can be easier to maintain and update, reducing the costs associated with website maintenance.

Conclusion

Updating your dog breeder website to a modern design can help improve its functionality, security, and overall user experience. A modern website design can help create a professional and trustworthy image of your breeding program, helping you attract more potential customers and stay ahead of your competitors.

Final Thoughts

As a dog breeder, your website is an essential marketing tool that can help you reach a wider audience and showcase your breeding program. Updating your website to a modern design can help you achieve these objectives, ensuring that your website is user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and visually appealing. Moreover, a modern website design can help improve your website’s security, SEO, and overall user experience, making it a cost-effective solution in the long run.

Need your outdated website redesigned and modernized? Contact us.

OfficialBreederDesigns@gmail.com

There are many equally important components that make up a functioning website. This article is to help familiarize you with the basics on your cat or dog breeding website.

The Domain Name

First we have the domain name. The domain name is the address used so internet users can find your kennel or cattery. Most businesses try to match the name of their business to their domain name; i.e., we are Breeder Designs and my domain name is www.BreederDesigns.com. However, it is not always possible – because once an exact domain name is purchased by someone else, it is no longer available for anyone else to purchase. It is very much like real estate. Once an address is purchased, it is no longer on the market. There is a chance it can be purchased privately from the domain name owner as a premium domain name, but expect to pay from a few hundred to several thousand dollars for a premium domain name. But don’t stress is your domain name isn’t available. There’s no rule that is has to match your business name. As long as it is short and memorable, or includes an easy to spell and easy to remember keyword phrase, you will be fine. So if you are Smith’s Cattery from New York and SmithsCattery dot com isn’t available, you can use a variation such as SmithsNYCattery or SmithPersiansofNY, etc. Or, you can even use a general domain name for your breeding business, such as XLBullyDogs dot com for your XL Bully breeding business. Sometimes you have to be a little creative. But when you find the right one, you will feel it. 

The Content

Content is an umbrella term used to describe a number of things such as, but not limited to: the images on your site, your text, your graphics, videos, logos, contracts, and other documents. So when you hear a web designer mention content, they mean all or some of these (depending on what you want on your site). Although content is displayed on your site via a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or with HTML, it is actually being uploaded to a host and stored there. We will talk about the host a little later. Content is probably one of the most important parts of the website. Your content is the first impression of your kennel or cattery. So high resolution images, professional language (spelling, grammar, & punctuation), professionally built graphics, and high resolution video are important. Remember, website visitors are going to base their perceived quality of your puppies or kittens on the quality of your content. Again and again, consumer and marketing studies have proven over and over that people purchase more products with high quality images than those with lower quality images. You can even research your own habits when shopping online. More likely than not, you have the same behavior. Fortunately, most of the newer cell phones have high resolution photo and video capabilities. You can learn more about how to get the best photos here: How To Take The Best Photos Of Your Dog Or Cat
High resolution videos are great too – but skip the vertical cell phone videos. Try to get into the habit of shooting cell phone videos horizontally, or purchase a good DSLR camera with video capabilities. YouTube is a great source for camera tutorials by model and lens type! Additionally, you are going to want to upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo – a direct upload onto your website will bog the site down, and cause speed/loading performance issues. Your videos can be easily embedded in your website, while still being hosted on YouTube or Vimeo. 

The Plugins

A plug-in is a piece of software that adds new features or extends functionality on your site. Plugins create processes such as social media sharing, social media streaming, drag & drop design capabilities, contact forms to receive emails by website visitors, caching, booking & appointments, embedding documents, redirection, store fronts, pay buttons, and so much more. Plugins are extremely useful, but most are not plug and play. Each plugin may require a setup in order to work properly on the site. Setup of a plugin can range from quick and very easy to extremely complex and time consuming. But the good thing about plugins is, there is something out there for almost any function that you want on your Breeder web design. Some plugins are free, but some plugins require a subscription or require a one time purchase fee. While we try to save money for our customers, there is a chance that a specific plugin a breeder wants on their website will require a them to purchase or subscribe for use (this is in reference to plugins a breeder website wouldn’t normally have). Additionally, if a plugin requires a setup that is extremely time consuming and complex, we may add an additional fee. Luckily though, most plugins do not fall under that description. Additionally, some organizations have their own plugins, such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square. Some plugins may require developer access to your account in order to complete setup. Developer access does not allow for us to see or modify any financial information or transactions. When available, we do set up a sandbox (testing account) to complete setup of the plugins that have sandbox testing. 

The Host

As mentioned briefly in the content section, the host is what stores your entire website files, including all of your content & plugins. The host also broadcasts your cat breeder website or dog breeder website onto the world wide web. Without a host, no one can see a website except the admin of that site when logged in. Read more about hosting here: WHAT IS HOSTING? Besides broadcasting your website, your host plays a key role in some SEO techniques and practices. It is also important to look at the reputation of your host. Some hosts have been blacklisted for spam and other frowned upon practices. If your site gets backlisted, you can lose almost all of your website traffic in Google. So you really want to stay away from cheap fly-by-night hosting services. We have a few we recommend on our Hosting page. However, if you have chosen our Platinum Package or Diamond Package, we include annual hosting. If you have the Starter Package, we host you free for 2 months – however, we will move your site over to the host of your choice after those 60 days. We do all the techie things for you, and we can also recommend a host and hosting package with a third party hosting company if you need assistance. 

The Design

The design of the site is super important. Things that some may not think can cause havoc for users & Google indexing, will. For example, illegible decorated fonts, images that aren’t optimized correctly or a layout that shifts can cause Google (Google bot) to deny indexing. Indexing is when a single page has been visited by Google, analyzed for content and meaning, and stored in the Google index. If a page is not indexed by Google, it will not be added to the search engine results when users search for kittens, puppies, or stud service. It is also important to mention, that the Google Algorithm (Google update) can and has also penalized websites for a number of things, including websites that do not have a responsive design; that is a design that is responsive all all devices (mobile, tablet, and desktop). This is usually due to old/outdated website builders and designs that use Flash (which is no longer supported and no longer works). Penalized sites or pages will be de-indexed from Google – meaning they will not show in the search results. 
The design is also important for users. If a visitor is unable to easily navigate through your site or has to wait for media to load (because your design is not optimized), website visitors will bounce.  Bounce is when a website visitor leaves your site without taking an action (such as clicking past your homepage). So it is important to have easy navigation and a good layout.