I have a soft spot for animals and I have been volunteering for at least a decade, since my teens. I was helping to the best of my abilities and through volunteering, I noticed that the majority of associations and volunteers don’t really know how to advertise animals and they don’t even consider being digitally present.
I knew most of animal rescue association didn’t have a website, some aren’t digitally present in any way. Also, everyone is using different platforms for advertising. That means many animals don’t have a fair chance to be seen by potential adopters.
I used Foundation 6 for CSS framework with light styling, I wanted to focus more on the backend of the app. I knew I need a landing, search results, profile, ad creation, and a dashboard. I didn’t have any backend experience prior to this project so I have chosen Laravel because the community is huge and there is the answer to every problem. Also, video tutorials helped me understand this framework in just a couple of weeks. After a couple of months, I had the working app. I implemented transactional emails through Mailgun and I am using deployHQ for easy updates.
My project was picked up by one of the biggest news publications in Croatia. Initial attention drew users and now there are about 800+ unique users every month with no marketing effort. If you want to check it out, visit https://udomi.net (in Croatian). Project is unfortunately dead.