I’m a volunteer for a dog training school. I have been training dogs with this place for about 7 years and have seen a lot of changes with their clients and methods.They also needed to upgrade a site to WordPress to make their site much more user friendly.

A business these days, of any kind, needs to have a website. Most people will look online to get their first impression of a business. Dog training schools are no different. People will check to see if there are good testimonials, what the schedule of classes are, and get a general impression about the school to see if they are going to help them with their dog’s problems.

The site that our school had was broken more often than not. The head trainer’s husband had created this site back in 2005. When it was created, he did what he could with the website builders that were available at the time and got a site up. Then he had to fit all the changes and modifications into the site around his schedule. He was able to do this much of the time but often the announcements would be on top of something else or not fit into the space that he was trying to fit into. The site was an html based site and just wasn’t easy to adjust. To top it off, he had a full time job with overtime so things weren't getting done in a timely manner.

I suggested that I could take over the site for them, update it into a WordPress site and make it do what they needed. We could add Google Analytics to the site so she could know how many people are actually using the site and even set up an email notification for subscribers so that they would know when the site got updated with new schedules or classes that are being added to the training schedule.

I started by getting the hosting passwords and jumped right into the old site and pulled all the current information up to my computer. This is done through an ftp client. Then I installed a program called KompoZer so that I could look at the website on my computer. KompoZer is a free WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program for working with html files. This got the site to display on my computer so I could work on the pictures and text files.

I thought perhaps that I should make the new site offline so that the current site wasn’t impacted while I was creating the new one. To do this I made a new installation of WordPress on my XXAMP server then started copying, importing and adjusting the visuals until the new site looked as close to the old one as possible. This took a couple of days to work all the kinks out but I think it turned out pretty well.

Since the new site was all done offline, I packed up my computer and took it out to the owner to have a look, she liked what I had done and had lots of ideas on how her site could be better now that she had someone that could actually work on it and it was on a software package that allowed the site to be easily modified. She was ecstatic that she had a working site!

Now, a year later, we have modified the site to track visitors, notify our students of bad weather and new classes and are able to update the site in a matter of minutes.

WordPress is a wonderful program that allows a website to be customer, developer and client friendly. It is simple to set up with the tools that are available and even can be customized with minimal effort. Using WordPress can be a great benefit to your online assets and will springboard your sites to new heights.