Clovis Animal Services
Anchored Web Solutions won this project after public bidding, and developed and helped launch this website, which is used by thousands of its community's citizens every month. As an active site for years, it has been a critical tool in the ongoing effort to reunite lost pets with their families.
Google Maps API
We configured the site to display interactive maps served by Google Maps to allow users of the site to interact with a dynamic map that displays lost and found pets. The map pinpoints were defined by other users listing their pets. The pinpoint are color-coded to match the status and species of each animal, making it even easier to search and find a certain animal.
Autogenerated Email Newsletters
The lost pet website had a requirement: send users a weekly newsletter with the latest lost and found pets. This was accomplished with a newsletter plugin that pulls directly from the website database to display animals, some details, and updates from the agency in an attractive format. The best part? This newsletter needs no maintenance. It sends out each week at the same time to thousands of users and is set up to already contain the latest animal listings.
Directory Listing Features
The heart of this site — listings of animals that were lost or found. This site uses a robust directory listing feature that is designed to allow users to enter their own listing details, publish them, and receive notifications from other users via email. The listings are held for review by the animal services staff before they're published, and users may register to the site to return and make new listings or manage their existing listings. All of this is a free service offered by the city's police department.
About this project
A female maltese. A male pit bull/husky mix. "Gigi," an orange and white cat who's owner says "never strays far from home."
These are just a few of the pets that have been separated from their families this month that are now listed on ClovisAnimalServices.com, a new website that recently launched and has already been receiving community submissions, just as officials had hoped.
Its slogan is, "Find lost pets, list found pets," and that's what the city hopes its citizens will do. With easy-to-use tools for anyone who's either lost a pet, or has found one and searching for the owner, the city's goal is for the site to become the first place any of its 110,000 citizens will check whenever their cats, dogs, or other pets have strayed away from home.
And unlike other lost pet websites, this one's for Clovis: it's updated by staff to show the pets that have arrived at the Clovis Animal Receiving & Care Center as well.
The Clovis Animal Services division of the City of Clovis, in partnership with the Clovis Animal Receiving & Care Center, formulated the vision for a simple, free website that displays lost and found pets on an interactive map while harnessing the power of the community through social media. It also had to be useful to as many of its citizens as possible, so the site not only has the latest code for today's modern Internet but is also simple enough for those pet owners who are not tech savvy.
The mapping technology itself is key to more pets finding their way home, because site visitors can zoom directly into their neighborhood to start their virtual search for a lost pet, said Adrian Rodriguez, owner of Anchored Web Solutions, the company hired to develop the website. The icons on the map are color-coded according to the type of listing, and visitors can filter the map by dogs, cats, or a catch-all category called "other." Clicking on any marker of the map pops open a box that displays a picture of the animal and some details, including a link to a full page of that listing.
From there, anyone seeing that listing can click a button to contact the person who listed the animal without sharing their own contact information — or they can have their message sent directly to CAS staff instead.
"Technology has the power to make a real difference in people's lives, and so it's one of the prouder moments when I can work on something that will truly help people," Rodriguez said. "I consider my pets to be family, and so the chance to work on something that I am certain will save a beloved family member from a worse fate... it's a no-brainer."
ClovisAnimalServices.com is a new tool in the ongoing effort to reunite animals with their owners more effectively throughout the city. The results are already visible on the site, as visitors can also see the pets who have been tagged by CAS staff with the one word every pet owner who has lost a pet wants to hear: "Reunited!"
