Save The Animals Foundation
Save The Animals Foundation Website
The website for a volunteer-run, no-kill animal shelter in Cincinnati, built as a custom WordPress theme from Solution Agency's in-house design.
The problem
Save The Animals Foundation (STAF) is a no-kill shelter in Cincinnati that cares for more than 300 cats and dogs. It is funded by donations and run by over 400 volunteers. Its website has three jobs: bring in donations, get animals adopted, and recruit volunteers.
The old site wasn’t built for any of them. It was put together from a few rigid page templates in WordPress’s classic editor, so most pages looked alike. Navigation was confusing: every URL ended in index.php, and many links jumped to sections of one long split-pane home page instead of dedicated pages. On phones, that split layout just scaled down instead of adapting to the smaller screen.
What I built
I built the site at Solution Agency from our in-house design:
- A custom WordPress theme, with no page builder
- A set of reusable content blocks, such as statistics, two-column content, icon lists, testimonials and blog listings, so the shelter’s team can put pages together without a developer
- Real pages with clean URLs in place of the old scroll-to-section links
- Give, Adopt and Volunteer sections, with DonorPerfect’s embedded donation forms and Gravity Forms for adoption and volunteer applications
- Adoptable dog and cat pages that show the shelter’s current animals through Petfinder’s own embed
- An events calendar for orientations and fundraisers, using The Events Calendar plugin themed to match the design
- A blog of adoption stories
- A password-protected member page linking to resources for volunteers
- Responsive layouts from phone to desktop
After launch, the site had to pass PCI compliance scans. Under newer PCI rules, a site needs scanning even when its payment forms are iframes from another provider. I moved the site to a VPS managed with SpinupWP, behind Cloudflare, and got it passing SecurityMetrics’ scans.
Implementation decisions
- Blocks that combine safely. Reusable blocks had to work together in layouts chosen by the shelter’s editors. For example, placing an image divider after a 50/50 image-and-text block could leave two images back to back. I first controlled visibility with a CSS class. When WordPress added editor controls for hiding content at different breakpoints, I switched to those so editors could manage visibility directly.
- Keeping the scores high with plugins in the mix. Third-party plugins often fail Lighthouse’s accessibility and performance checks by default, and theming them to match a design can introduce new failures. Gravity Forms and The Events Calendar both had to be themed to fit the site without dragging down the scores of the pages they appear on.
Result
The site launched in June 2026 and is live at staf.org. At launch it scored 95 overall in Unlighthouse, which runs every Lighthouse category (performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO) across every page of the site.
Screenshots
