4 Must-Have Sections When Building Your Doggie Daycare Website

Building a website for your doggie daycare can be one of the longest steps of starting your doggie daycare business. There are a couple options you can take when it comes to building your website, you can either do it yourself, pay a website designer, or you can decide to skip having a website. If you take the third option, you might as well just close down shop because you’re going to have a hard time getting clients when your competition has online appointment scheduling, picture galleries, and webcams and your business is just a phone number in their phone. It’s not impossible to be a successful boarding kennel without a website (in fact, I personally know of a boarding hotel that doesn’t have a website), but you’re going to have more difficulties than if you simply had a website.

1. Easy to Use Contact Form for Pet Parents

One of the most important things you can include on your doggie daycare website is an easy to use contact form. You’re going to have lots of website visitors that want to ask questions about your business? Maybe they can’t find certain pricing information, or maybe they’re looking to get a special quote for an extra long boarding session. Regardless, if you don’t give your potential customers an easy way to contact your business, you’re taking the risk that you might lose those customers. With the amount of pet boarding facilities out there today, your customers have options, and you don’t want someone trying another business simply because they couldn’t find a way to easily contact you on your website.

2. Embedded Google Maps for Easy Business Location

With over 2,500 boarding kennels using DoggieDashboard to manage their business, I’ve had the opportunity to look at hundreds of doggie daycare websites. One feature that I see pop up on almost all of the most well-built websites is an embedded Google Maps widget with the business’s location highlighted. You might not think it’s a big deal to have your location easily highlighted, but it gives people a general sense of where you’re located, and since most people understand how to use Google’s tools, they know how to use the Google Map’s widget. If you just have your address listed as a line of text on your website, you’re asking that your website visitors copy and paste that text into a search engine, most likely Google, so that they can see where you’re located. Why not cut out a step and do it for them?

3. Picture Gallery to Showcase Boarding Facility

Another thing that you should really consider adding to your dog boarding website is a photo gallery of your accommodations. Pet parents want to know where their little fur baby is going to be sleeping when they drop him/her off for their boarding appointment. By offering your website visitors a photo gallery of the inside of your business, pet parents can see exactly where their pet will be staying, what kind of facility you operate, how clean it is, etc. Your website’s job is to answer questions about your business so that when someone arrives, they’re ready to give you their business, not ask a million questions. Having a picture gallery will help answer lots of questions, trust me.

4. Online Appointment Request Form

Once your business is up and running, you’re going to start dealing with hundreds of appointments per month. If you’re starting your doggie daycare as a solo venture, you’re going to be answering the phone constantly, scheduling appointments and answering appointments about availability. Add an online appointment request form to your website so that clients can request appointments directly from your website, instead of calling you asking if you’re available for a certain day. An online appointment form also adds a layer of professionalism to your business and your website. You’re not a whiteboard appointment business, you’re a modern pet boarding facility that understands the technology world and uses it to your advantage.

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