For six weeks, most evenings and every weekend, I wasn't invoicing anyone. I was rebuilding livepaws.net — the website for Live Paws Tenerife, a dog rescue charity based in the south of the island — completely pro bono, alongside my paying client work.
No contract. No deadline pressure from a client chasing me. Just a charity that was quietly losing the fight to keep its website running, and a decision on my part that I could fix it. This is what that build actually involved, and why I think it's relevant to any service business in Tenerife trying to work out whether their own website is helping them or holding them back.
The Charity That Couldn't Keep Up
Live Paws Tenerife runs almost entirely on volunteers. Before the rebuild, their site was sitting on failing, over-quota hosting, loading in a sluggish 3.4 seconds, and — worse for a charity that lives or dies on getting dogs in front of adopters — every single update depended on someone who actually knew their way around WordPress admin.
New arrival at the shelter? Someone had to log into wp-admin, find the right custom fields, upload photos one by one, and hope they didn't break the layout. Volunteers who weren't technical simply didn't touch it. Content stalled. Dogs who needed exposure the most were the ones least likely to get an up-to-date profile.
The Brief: Build It So a Volunteer Can Run It
The rebuild had two halves. First, a full server migration off the failing hosting onto something stable. Second — and the harder part — a completely custom WordPress platform built around one rule: nobody should ever need to see wp-admin again.
Everything a volunteer needs to do — add a dog, update a status, publish a birthday shout-out, manage photos — had to live inside a clean, purpose-built dashboard. Not a stripped-down version of WordPress. A genuinely different front door onto the same data.
Inside the New Admin Panel
The dashboard opens to a straightforward overview: total dogs in care, how many are still looking for a home, how many are reserved, and every news post ever published — filterable by status with a click, searchable by name. No jargon, no settings menus, no plugin updates to worry about.
Every dog's profile is built from plain-language fields — age, size, gender, energy level, whether they're good with kids, dogs or cats, house-trained status, a video link — plus a drag-and-drop photo gallery where clicking any image sets it as the featured photo. No code, no confusion, no calling me every time something needs changing.
A Front End Dogs (and People) Can Actually Search
The old site made you scroll. The new one lets adopters filter by name, age, size and gender, jump straight to "Looking for a Home", "Reserved", "In Foster Care" or "Homed", and see recent arrivals in one tap. On the day I'm writing this, that search is returning 77 dogs live on the public site — all pulled from the same dashboard the volunteers already know how to use.
That's the bit I'm proudest of, honestly. It's not just a prettier front end — it's the search functionality actually doing its job: helping the right dog find the right family faster, instead of burying them in an endless unfiltered list.
The Numbers, Six Weeks In
- Load time: down from 3.4 seconds to under 1 — on hosting that isn't fighting for its life anymore.
- Zero developer dependency: every dog and every news post since launch has been added by a volunteer, not by me.
- 77 dogs, searchable in seconds by anyone visiting the site, on any device.
- 954 news posts and counting — a full, working history the charity can finally search and manage instead of losing in an admin panel nobody wanted to open.
What Seven Days a Week Taught Me
I won't pretend six weeks of evenings and weekends was easy to sustain alongside paying client work. But holding myself to that pace on a project where nobody was chasing me for deadlines was, in a strange way, more disciplining than client work usually is. There's nowhere to hide behind a scope document when the only person setting the deadline is you.
It also reminded me why I got into this in the first place. Long before Apple, Mars or BP, technology was interesting to me because of what it let ordinary people do without needing an expert standing over their shoulder. That's exactly what this build had to be: something a volunteer with no technical background could run, confidently, on day one.
Why This Matters If You Run a Tenerife Business
The principles behind the Live Paws rebuild are the same ones I apply to every electrician, plumber, pest control operator and removals company I build for: a site has to load fast, has to work properly on a phone, and has to be something you can update yourself without ringing me every time a job needs adding or a price changes. A charity running on volunteers and a business running on a sole trader's spare hour in the evening have more in common than you'd think.
If a rescue charity volunteer with zero web experience can log in and publish a dog's profile in two minutes, a tradesperson can absolutely manage their own site without living in fear of breaking it.
Want a Website You Can Actually Run Yourself?
Enterprise-grade reliability, built for how Tenerife service businesses actually work. Free analysis, no obligation.
Meet the Dogs Behind This Story
Live Paws Tenerife still has 62 dogs looking for a home. If you're local, or know someone who is, take a look — it's the search feature described above, doing exactly what it was built to do.
Visit Live Paws Tenerife →See the full technical breakdown of this project on the portfolio page.