Wag’n Tails / the website
The website kept the record
During my 14 months at Wag’n Tails, a lot changed. My role changed. The team changed. The strategy changed. And there probably isn’t a clearer record of all of that than the website.
This did not start as an assigned beautiful redesign. During my first couple of months, including a week of 60+ hours, I realized we had a major website problem. The site kept crashing. We did not have the technical support internally to deal with that. We were not tracking lead activity, and we did not have a real effort to attract and capture leads. The messaging was heartless and outdated. It took me way too long to understand what the business did.
Hello, daily calls from people looking for dog grooming services.
okay. we have a website problem.
Those crashes did not wait for a convenient week. I was already in the middle of an absurd number of hours, and there wasn’t a clear person to call.
cool. another crash.
my face when the website crashed unexpectedly.
The website I inherited
These screens are the site before my tenure. What I walked into had been built for an earlier stage of the company. Not my work.
The information was there. A homepage, a vehicle page, financing as an application, a way to get in touch. Useful information. Not necessarily an easy journey. My job wasn’t to erase everything that came before it.
- this form was doing a lot.
- one website. several jobs.
- hello, dog grooming appointments.
The site I walked into
It became my problem
I was the Digital Marketing Manager being asked to run ads, push traffic, build campaigns, and support leads. The issues pointed at larger company priorities. I still had a very clear problem, and not many quick ways to solve it.
As the person being asked to drive more traffic to the website, I had a very obvious problem: I wasn’t particularly confident in where I was sending them.
maybe stop buying traffic for five seconds?
November 2025
In November 2025 I decided to completely recreate the website. I had never worked in WordPress at this level, and I was nervous about the list of problems that could come from building a custom site.
I knew what I wanted the experience to become. I was significantly less certain that I knew how to make WordPress do it.
I built it anyway.
- I have never done this before.
- can Kadence do this? no. custom code it is.
December 2025
By December 2025 I launched the new site. I built it. WordPress, Kadence Builder, custom code blocks, custom CSS, and a lot of Google and patience.
The technical side was a real change for ads and traffic. What excited me even more was where the messaging was headed. The pages still did not all arrive together. Some were ahead of others. Temporary visuals. Experiments. That was the middle.
oh, now we need a journey.
Then it kept going
The rebuild let me do the job I had actually been asked to do. Ad landing pages. A path that could convert. Lead tracking. Analytics. Forms. Journeys that could reach Salesforce. SEO. A call to action that belonged on that page. A way to see whether a campaign was working.
For the first time, I could send someone to a page with a purpose, understand what they did there, and build a next step around it.
The technical work mattered. What excited me more was how Wag’n Tails started talking about itself. Independence. Entrepreneurship. Flexibility. Owning your route. Building a business. The people in the vans, and the people building them. The customers. Going mobile. The site stopped being only a place to list vans.
After December, none of that sat still. The homepage learned a sentence: we build the vans, you own the route. Grooming and veterinary could live as one company. Vehicle pages grew specs, a price you could read, financing explained instead of an application that assumed you were ready, and a reason to talk to a person. The general contact form stopped being the only door. A brochure. Prequalification. A scheduled call. Support. Feedback. Quizzes and calculators. An assistant. Custom templates and animation. The Next Mile.
Nearly 90 percent of people were on a phone, so mobile stopped being the secondary version. It was the website.
mobile. mobile. mobile.
Later pages, on a phone
The Next Mile
The Next Mile is where that thinking moved. More human. More willing to listen. More comfortable saying they were still improving. It is a chapter of this website, not the whole campaign.
this is definitely no longer just a redesign.
The campaign, on its own The Next MileThe fun part
One of the most insanely cool parts of the work I did at Wag’n Tails was building this website and realizing how much I loved learning what was possible.
I loved learning WordPress. I loved figuring out custom code. Sometimes a thing I was sure needed a developer was something I could teach myself. I could take an idea in my head and make it real on the page.
The website I launched in December 2025 was not the website I eventually left behind. And the website I left behind wasn’t finished either. The company changed. Customers changed. The products changed. I learned more, and I had better ideas. I don’t think a good website reaches done. It becomes the next version.
The website I left was not the finished version. It was simply the latest one.
- Role
- Digital Marketing Manager, then Director of Marketing
- What I did
- Strategy, UX, messaging, web design, WordPress, development, SEO, and lead generation
The first scroll is the site I walked into, before my tenure. The later screens are from the site while I was there. The live website can keep changing.
View the current Wag’n Tails website ↗ Next project Building a Customer Journey from the Ground Up