The client
Your Pet Space is a cage-free dog daycare, boarding, grooming and training facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, owned by Joy and Dave Jones.
Joy contacted me because the website was about 12 years old and no longer reflected the business. She wanted a modern but playful site, stronger local search visibility, and a clearer way to present their training programs.
The challenge
The existing site used the business's space theme, but it was dated and difficult to use. Light text sat on a dark background, with whole paragraphs set in capital letters. The nine-item menu grouped every service under a single "Pet Care" dropdown, and content changes required working through WordPress and its plugins.
The domain also had more than a decade of history with Google, so the rebuild needed to keep that history intact and ensure all old pages were redirected correctly.
The approach
Design and structure
My first homepage mockup used a clean, light design without the space theme the business is known for. After Joy shared photos of the space murals her staff had painted on the facility walls, I revised the direction around them, with custom illustrations based on the murals and copy that carries the same theme.
Each service moved out of the old "Pet Care" dropdown onto its own page in the main menu. The training page, which Joy wanted to present more clearly, compares the three programs side by side with what each is best suited for, so owners can choose one before calling. New Client and Existing Client buttons in the header of every page connect to the booking software the team already used.
Content, migration and SEO
The site is connected to Sanity, a content management system, so the owners can update text, team members, gallery photos and form fields without working through WordPress plugins or contacting a developer. I walked Joy through the editor on a recorded call for future reference.
Business email stayed with the existing provider on a low-cost, email-only plan, so staff kept their current inboxes. Old page addresses redirect to their new equivalents, preserving the domain's existing links and search listings. For local search, each page title and the homepage headline pair the service with Las Cruces, for example "Dog Daycare & Boarding in Las Cruces, NM".
The results
Within four weeks of launch, the site received more than 200 clicks from Google Search. It ranks on page one for 15 local searches that do not include the business name.
| Search | Average position |
|---|---|
| doggy daycare las cruces | 1.8 |
| dog day care las cruces | 2.0 |
| dog kennel las cruces | 2.0 |
| las cruces dog boarding | 3.2 |
| dog boarding las cruces nm | 3.5 |
| dog hotel las cruces | 4.0 |
| dog boarding las cruces | 4.5 |
| pet boarding las cruces | 5.3 |
| dog training las cruces | 9.1 |
Boarding and daycare searches bring in the most visitors, and "dog boarding las cruces" is the top search after the business name. More than half of the clicks with a recorded search term came from searches that did not include the business name.