Welcome to I Need a Home! We aim to provide an easy to use website allowing rescue centres and council pounds in the South Yorkshire area to list their animals currently in need of forever homes, at the same time people looking to adopt don’t need to search through individual websites to find their perfect match.
History
The original site was created late 2011 with Rain Rescue providing the funds to get started and it went through a couple of updates before reaching a usable state, whilst it worked there were a few compromises from both a user experience and technical point of view. In November 2016 we decided to start over and did some crowd-funding to pay for the needed software, thanks to some very generous people and a bit of help from the software vendors we got everything purchased and set about rebuilding….
Its taken a bit longer than we hoped to get this far, the site is managed by a husband and wife team who to be honest underestimated the scale of the task ahead – throw in more than a few personal dramas, some false starts and something of a learning curve and its been an interesting ride… We got there in the end and hope everyone adding animals to the as well as those looking for a new companion like the new site.
Supporters
A massive thanks to everyone who donated via our Go Fund Me page, we didn’t expect to reach the target as quick as we did and without you none of this would have happened.
Thumbs up also to
- OnTheGoSystems / Toolset
- Despite taking so long to get the site sorted they still honoured their promise to upgrade our licence and without Toolset the site wouldn’t be here now.
- GeneratePress
- We tried a few themes with varying degrees of success, GeneratePress was the best combination of features without fuss and made things much easier. The kind reduction in price was also much appreciated
- Pinegrow
- Very kindly donated a copy of their excellent design software.
Going forwards
In the longer term we’re considering opening up the site nationally and reaching a wider audience, in the meantime it would be great to get as many local rescues / pounds involved as possible – this new site has added some new features that should make it easier to use for both them and visitors. The site is also free to use, we pay all the domain and hosting fees and can offer some of the smaller rescues that may not have their own websites a place to list their animals.