PitBulls.org is a community and information site centered around the American Pit Bull Terrier, usually referred to as Pit Bulls.

Pit Bulls get a lot of coverage in the media, usually negative, because there is rampant fear of the breed. They are also often the target of Breed Specific Legislation (BSL). PitBulls.org aims to share another perspective, those of passionate Pit Bull owners. The main mission of the site is to convey that Pit Bulls make great family pets, to get the word out that a dog is only a reflection how it is treated and raised, and to provide a central hub where owners can connect and share their pictures and stories.

The site was conceived and developed by PropDrop Web Development and Marketing. PropDrop not only does client work, but also performs web niche analysis and develops in-house web properties based on that research in order to gain market share in a wide variety of areas. PitBulls.org is one of these properties. It also doesn't hurt that we are dog lovers and own a Pit Bull/Lab mix named Bauer, so we are our own audience in some sense.

PropDrop uses Drupal exclusively for its in-house projects, because we can create a community and information site with some advanced features in under 2 weeks, with everything optimized for search with little effort. It also gives us the opportunity to expand a site's feature set in the future without interfering with current functionality, taking a site in directions that might not be possible with other content management systems.

The Problem

Pit Bull owners are a passionate bunch, and there are many websites that cater to them and have information about the breed. But these sites are still stuck in the nineties. Some are just forums, and most are just static sites. There are a couple of sites that offer great information, but absolutely no user interactivity, built for one-and-done searchers and not for building relationships. A large portion also seem to be stuck in the realm of Yahoo Groups. Our goal was to build a site to match the passion of the demographic.

Showing Off

Dog owners love to show off pictures of their companions. They're like children or grandchildren. Easy ways to share pictures was a must for the site. We did this two ways:

One was the dog bio. Using filefield, imagefield, and imagecache, we let users upload a mini-gallery and give a quick description of their dog. The most recent 6 bios are featured on the front page.

Originally, we used a size limit per picture upload of 1 MB and limited them to 5 pictures. This turned out to be a usability disaster.

Most people just want to upload straight from their digital camera, and most of these pictures are more than 1 MB. We can't exactly expect users to open up Photoshop and downsize their image before putting it on the site.

So we used the imagefield setting "Maximum File Size per Node" instead of limiting the size per image. We maxed it out at 5MB. This way, users will be able to upload 2 to 3 images with no problems, which seems to be the sweet spot. If they want one big, quality image, they can do that to. But size restrictions have not been a point of complaint since changing this.

The second way we allow owners to show off is with contests. We made two content types: Contest and Contest Entry, with a CCK node reference field pointing each Contest Entry to it's respective contest.

Contest entries were listed on each Contest page with an embedded view in the .tpl.php file that took the Contest node ID as an argument:

<span style="color: #000000"><span style="color: #0000BB">&lt;?php<br>&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #007700">print </span><span style="color: #0000BB">views_embed_view</span><span style="color: #007700">(</span><span style="color: #DD0000">'contest_entries'</span><span style="color: #007700">, </span><span style="color: #DD0000">'default'</span><span style="color: #007700">, </span><span style="color: #0000BB">$node</span><span style="color: #007700">-&gt;</span><span style="color: #0000BB">nid</span><span style="color: #007700">); <br></span><span style="color: #0000BB">?&gt;</span></span>

This was made possible with the Views module, of course.

Users can vote on entries with the plus1 and VotingAPI modules.

This would all be pointless if it wasn't easy to manage on the admin side, as we're getting at least 150+ entries on every contest so far. We used the Flag module to make it easy for an admin to choose a winner, and a view that narrows down the entries to the ones with 5 or more votes. An admin just has to click on the flag link and the winner is selected.

And More Showing Off

But only one picture is chosen as a winner. So what to do with the other great entries? Simple. Attach some taxonomy terms to them and create keyword segregated galleries.

We again used the Flag module to allow an admin to mark other entries as "featured", and these would get automatically displayed in a certain gallery on the site.

This also helps mitigate the "sore loser" problem that often crops up when running online contests.

Rescue Shelters

Right now, the United States is overrun with stray Pit Bulls. It's a problem with other dogs too, but Pit Bulls are unique because of the fear that many people have of them. For this reason, we wanted the site to promote adoption as the most desirable way to acquire a Pit Bull.

There are other listings of Rescue Shelters online, but none where users could add shelters themselves. We hope this will help bring to light smaller shelters that might not get much recognition otherwise, and help fill in the gaps for under-served areas.

With the Views and Location modules, the list can be sorted and filtered based on the State.

And some rescue shelters are better than others, believe it or not. For example, some that say they are "no-kill"...aren't. And some aren't really shelters at all. So using Fivestar, we wanted to give visitors a chance to rate and leave reviews of their experiences.

Theme

A custom theme was designed and created based on earthy but playful colors, which seems to match both breed and owner temperament. Pit Bulls are physically strong (yet gentle) dogs with proud owners.

The front page was key. We could have gone the "news layout" route with links to articles everywhere and risk information overload. That's good for a news site. But PitBulls.org would not be a news site, even though there would be plenty of information available. So the trick was to offer a portal for the rest of the site, but to keep the focus on just a few things.

1. Dog Bios - Since one of the main goals of the site is to let owners show off, featuring the most recent Dog Bios on the front page was a no-brainer.
2. Recent Blogs and Contests - Contests would be a major part of the user experience on the site, and the blog would be used to highlight time-sensitive news items
3. Welcome Message and What to Expect - Visitors can get a clear idea of what to expect from the site

At the same time, the right sidebar highlights the most popular content on the site at the top using Quick Tabs so that new users get an immediate glimpse of exactly what the site offers. It also houses the Recent Comments block to give a quick view of the activity on the site.

These days, the footer is prime real estate. If a user has scrolled all the way down, it's a good chance they are at least somewhat engaged with your content. If you don't give them something else to do, you're losing out on a great chance to draw a user even deeper into your site. So we repeated the the top menu, added links to specific categories of articles, included the Active Forums block, and displayed a random selection of pictures with a link to all the galleries.

Promotion and Traffic

The main source of promotion so far has been through Facebook. In less than a month, it already has over 15,000 fans or "likes", which shows how hungry people are for another outlet.

SEO will of course be part of promotion, and Drupal makes the on-page portion very simple. Page Title was used to differentiate the HTML title from the actual node title. The HTML title is what is shown in search engine results, so having easy control over it is a must to ensure a good keyword breadth and an optimal click through ratio.

The site is currently getting 500 to 1000 visitors per day.

For the Future

One of the great things about Drupal is that your site is almost infinitely extensible, and so planning for the future doesn't take that much brain power. For instance, we may want to add an online store or a paid classifieds system. This could be done in under 3 days with the Ubercart module.

The site will continue to have a large number of image uploads and views, so a migration to a CDN might be in order for the future and save us from having to increase local storage space.

All in all, this was just another day's work for Drupal, allowing the development of a dynamic and interactive website in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Very little custom programming was necessary, with most of the work involving CSS and theming the overall look and feel.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x