The Grey Muzzle Organization is a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of at-risk senior dogs by providing funding and resources to animal shelters, rescue organizations, sanctuaries, and other non-profit groups nationwide.

The Goal: The Grey Muzzle Organization partnered with Specbee to redesign their website, looking for clearer mission communication and more upbeat messaging to help senior dogs thrive. They sought a modern, user-friendly site to boost donations and user engagement.

Our work in a nutshell:

• A complete UI/UX redesign
• Seamless migration from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10
• Fixing high-priority bugs caused by a previous problematic Drupal migration
• Launched before critical funding deadline to ensure a seamless user experience
• Implemented CKEditor styles for a consistent visual effect across text sizes
• Developed a custom theme using Specbee's in-house-built Drupal theme generator

• The website faced numerous critical bugs resulting from a previous problematic migration, impacting performance and user experience. Additionally, preparing for an upcoming Drupal 10 upgrade required careful planning to ensure all issues were addressed without redundancy.
• The organization had specific periods where securing donations was crucial for their operations. Any website changes during these times risked disrupting the user experience and potentially impacting the flow of donations, which could have significant consequences for their funding.
• The need for a highly impactful user experience design required us to implement various custom solutions, such as CKEditor styles for a squiggly effect on text, which we designed carefully to look visually appealing across all text sizes.

• Specbee meticulously managed the website’s bug resolution process by prioritizing higher-priority issues first and planning the resolution of lower-priority bugs during the Drupal 10 upgrade. With this approach, we ensured efficiency and avoided duplicative work.
• Our team was also highly sensitive to the organization's critical funding periods, exercising caution when making changes to ensure a seamless user experience and maintain the flow of donations.
• For frontend development, we created a custom theme using our very own theme generator Drupal-theme-init, with the homepage constructed utilizing Layout Builder and Custom Block Types. We ensured consistent styling and minimized naming conflicts with the adoption of BEM class naming conventions.
• Our team employed eslint and Stylint for JS and CSS code checks to maintain code quality, while SVG icons were used to enhance control over image resizing and transition effects.
• Key Drupal modules such as Layout Builder Modal, Layout Builder Styles, and Layout Builder Restrictions were integrated to provide a seamless authoring experience.
• Throughout the project, we applied our structured internal QA process to ensure that development quality was upheld before progressing to customer testing and the final production release

The redesigned site has shown significant improvements in various metrics, highlighting the effectiveness of the changes implemented. Below are a few metrics showing the transition from the old to the new Grey Muzzle Organization website.

Average Engagement Time

Paid Traffic: Increased from 1 min 53 secs to 2 min 36 secs (38.58% improvement)
Referral Traffic: Increased from 1 min 12 secs to 2 min 03 secs (69.30% improvement)
Organic Video Traffic: Increased from 31 secs to 46 secs (48.34% improvement)
Organic Traffic: Increased from 1 min 15 secs to 1 min 19 secs (5.59% improvement)

Specbee continues to provide ongoing Drupal support and maintenance, including minor version updates, bug fixes, and consulting. Additionally, we’re actively providing The Grey Muzzle Organization with SEO and analytics services.