Play Pawz — Brendon Rice

The right answer was WordPress, and that was a decision.

Pet owners choose a daycare on feel. They want to see the actual dogs, the actual staff and the actual yard, decide within about ten seconds that their dog would be happy there, and then find the enquiry form. That's the whole job of the site.

The second requirement mattered more than the first: the team needed to change opening hours, swap photos, add a post about this week's themed activity and adjust pricing themselves, at eight at night, without a developer in the loop. A hand-built site would have made me a permanent dependency.

So this one is WordPress with Elementor Pro, built properly — global styles rather than ad-hoc styling on every section, so the site still looks designed after two years of the client editing it.

Photography ledReal dogs, real staff, real facility. Stock imagery would undo the entire point.

Client managedPages, posts, hours, pricing and photos all editable without touching code.

Local searchA page per service, targeting what people actually type into Google locally.

Bookings and enquiriesEnquiry and booking forms routed straight to the team's inbox.

Building a WordPress site that survives the client.

The difference between a site that ages well and one that doesn't is almost entirely in the setup.

Global styles before pages

Typography, colour and spacing are defined once as global settings and applied everywhere. A section styled locally looks identical on day one and drifts the moment anyone edits it — which is exactly when you're not there to notice.

Reusable section templates

Service pages are built from saved templates rather than duplicated by hand, so a new service is a fifteen-minute job for the owner and comes out matching the rest of the site.

Local SEO structure

One page per service with its own title, meta description and heading structure, targeting the way people actually search — the query is "dog grooming near me", not the business's internal name for the service. Configured through Yoast so the client can see and adjust it.

Forms routed properly

Enquiry and booking forms send to the team with the sender's address set correctly for replies, so a booking request doesn't land in spam or arrive unanswerable.

Performance on real phones

Images resized and compressed before upload rather than relying on the browser to scale a 4MB photo, plus caching, a CDN and SSL. A photography-heavy site is a performance problem unless someone deals with the images.

Handover as a deliverable

Automatic backups, a walkthrough with the team, and the site left in a state where the next person — me or anyone else — can pick it up without a folder of tribal knowledge.

A site the owners run themselves.

The right answer was WordPress, and that was a decision.