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PAAWS RI was formed in December 2011 with a mission to provide services to the most vulnerable populations of animals. PAAWS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides surgical, rehabilitation and adoption services for homeless animals within Rhode Island.
The organization had a website that was created with a popular website building service. However, this gave PAAWS RI limited control for customizing and implementing advanced features on their site. The website building service also had no options for exporting the site to any other hosting service as they outgrew their current provider.
Call One Tech Solutions was contracted to migrate their website to an open-source platform and give them the unlimited potential to grow the website as the needs of their organization expanded.
First, we secured the paawsri.org domain in addition to the paaswsri.com domain they currently held. It is important to use the proper .ORG top-level domain whenever possible for non-profit organizations. Using the proper top-level domain can also provide additional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits.
With no process in place to export their existing site from the website building service, we were forced to completely recreate www.paawsri.org using the previous website as an artistic reference.
Website building tools from services such as Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and others rely on luring customers with low prices and ease of use. However, these services lock you into their specific formats and make it very difficult to move your website to another service provider. This becomes a much larger issue after your site outgrows the website builder’s service offerings and begins to suffer.
We were able to successfully recreate www.paawsri.org on Call One Tech Solutions hosting services. We selected the open-source content management system (CMS), WordPress, to power their new website. This migration opened up many new management and security features that were previously unavailable with the original website builder platform.
Their new website also provided finite control over user accounts and permissions. This allowed them to delegate specific tasks to certain volunteers that now work under a central website managing staff member. Their previous website management tool took an “all or nothing” approach to account access levels.
PAAWS RI now has full control over every aspect of their website (https://www.paawsri.org) and the scalability to meet any demands their non-profit requires in the future.
