The viewing request is the symptom
Most catteries offer viewings, and most catteries are glad to. But count how many of them you did last spring, how long each one took, how many turned into a booking, and how many were people who wanted to see the pens because your website would not show them.
The viewing exists because a cat owner is not buying a service, she is choosing a room she will never see her cat in. Nobody books a room from an exterior shot of the building. Everything below is about answering that on the site so the viewing becomes a choice rather than a requirement.
What she is actually looking for
Ask cattery owners what people say on a viewing and it is remarkably consistent. How big is it. Where does she sleep. Can she go outside. Is it heated. Can she see other cats, and how close are they. Is it clean. Is it quiet.
A photograph answers all of those in a second, and a paragraph answers none of them. The mistake is not having too few photographs, it is having the wrong ones: a cat asleep on a shelf tells the owner nothing about the shelf.
Structure by pen type first
Before any photography, decide what your pen types are and give each one a name an owner can hold onto: standard single, deluxe, family pen for two or three cats from one home, quiet pen away from the walkway, and whatever else you run. Each type gets its own place on the site with its own photographs, its nightly price, its multi-cat rate and its own booking button.
That structure does four things at once. It lets an owner self-select before she contacts you. It makes the price table make sense. It gives the booking deep-link something to point at. And it gives search engines four specific pages rather than one page called "Our cattery".
The shots that actually answer the question
For each pen type, in daylight, with the pen clean and empty unless you have a resident whose owner has agreed in writing.
- The sleeping area straight on, with the bedding in it, from about cat height.
- The whole unit from the outside so the size reads against something familiar, a door frame or a person.
- The run, showing the mesh, the shelves and the height.
- The view the cat has, taken from where the cat sits.
- The heater or heat source, with a caption saying what temperature you keep.
- The gap between pens, so sneeze barriers and spacing are visible rather than claimed.
- The corridor or block, showing how many pens there are and how much room around them.
That is seven images per type. Seven honest photographs beat forty pretty ones, and they load faster.
Captions are half the work
An uncaptioned photograph raises questions. Write one plain line under each: "Sleeping area, heated to 18 degrees, with a shelf and a covered bed." "Outdoor run, full height, with the neighbouring pen a metre away behind a solid barrier." "Family pen, for two or three cats from the same home, single price for the pen." Say the number. Owners are looking for numbers.
The walk-through video
Ninety seconds, filmed on a phone, walking slowly from the reception door along the block and into one pen, then out into the run. No music, or something very quiet. The sound of a calm building doing nothing much is itself reassuring. Show a real cleaning routine mid-action if you can, because clean is a claim on every cattery site and evidence on very few.
Host it on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it with a poster image so the home page does not carry the weight of a video file. It should not be the first thing that loads.
Photograph the things you would show on a viewing
The isolation or sick bay, the food preparation area, the medication cupboard or fridge, the laundry, the fire and security arrangements, and the outside grounds. On a viewing you point at these without thinking. On the site they are usually missing, and they are exactly what separates you from the cattery whose site is one gallery.
What to do about cats in shot
Cats in residence make photographs warmer and they need permission. Ask at booking with a simple opt-in, note it in the booking record, and keep a list. Never publish a photograph of somebody's cat because it looked nice. And do not use stock photography at all: an owner who reaches your site after two others can tell, and it undoes the rest of the page.
Keep it current
Pens get repainted, runs get extended, a new block opens. Photographs that are three years old start to look it, and an owner who arrives to something different from the site has been mildly misled. Reshoot one pen type a season and it never goes stale.
Where this sits
Pen types as their own priced, photographed, bookable units are the core of how we build a cattery website, with the shot list, the captions and the compressed gallery included, and the same premises photography thinking runs through our pet business websites. Packages are on pricing. The aim is not to end viewings. It is to make sure the people who ask for one have already decided.