A shoot with a plan, then pages that stay fast
Getting your facilities onto a daycare and boarding website is a small project rather than an afternoon: a shot list, a morning with a camera, permissions, a set of image sizes, and pages built so forty photographs load quickly and can be added to every month. Here is the setup, start to finish.
Step 1: the shot list
Write it before the shoot, walking the route a dog takes through the building. Every space from the gate to where it sleeps, each from an owner's eye height and once from a dog's height. Then the people.
- Arrival: the entrance and car park, reception, the collection point, the lead-handover area.
- Assessment: the space a new dog is assessed in.
- Daycare: each play area, framed wide enough to judge the size, with a real group in it. Small dog and large dog areas separately if you split them. The rest room. The enrichment and toy storage.
- Outdoors: the paddock or yard, the fencing shown at full height, the gates, the double gating if you have it, the shaded area.
- Boarding: each accommodation type, made up as it would be for a guest. Bedding, heating, the run attached to the kennel, the family room where two dogs from one household share, the quiet room.
- Behind the scenes: the kitchen where food is prepared, the medication cupboard, the laundry, the wash-down area. These are the cleanliness shots and they do more work than any of the cute ones.
- People: each team member at work, by name, and a group photo outside the building.
Tick the list off during the shoot. The one you skip is the one an owner phones to ask about.
Step 2: the shoot itself
Daylight, lights on, doors open, on a day the place is clean but working, so there are real dogs in the frames. A photographer for a morning is the best value on a kennel website; a recent phone in good light is the workable fallback.
Shoot wide for size and close for cleanliness. Nothing staged that is not true on a normal Tuesday.
Film on the same morning: one continuous ninety-second clip following a dog's route from the gate to the play area to where it sleeps, and a shorter clip of a play session.
Step 3: permissions
Client dogs in the photographs need the owner's permission, and staff need to agree to appear. Add a photo permission to the consent form in Gingr, PetExec, Revelation Pets or Kennel Connection so future photographs are covered from first booking. For the shoot day itself, a message to the owners of the dogs in that day. Keep a note of who agreed against each image.
Step 4: sizes, formats and naming
Photographs straight from a camera are several megabytes each, and forty of them on one page is why kennel sites crawl. Before upload:
- Export at 1600 pixels on the long edge for gallery images, 2400 for the one hero image, and let the site generate the smaller sizes.
- Modern formats such as WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, quality around 75 to 80.
- Descriptive file names and alt text in plain words: "boarding-kennel-with-outdoor-run" rather than "IMG_4821".
- Lazy loading for everything below the first screen, with width and height set so the page does not jump as it loads.
- Video on YouTube or Vimeo, embedded with a poster image, so no player script loads until the owner taps play.
Step 5: photos as records
Each image is a record with fields: the image, a one-line caption ("Small dog play area, up to eight dogs, morning session"), the area it shows, the service it relates to, the date, and the permission note.
The premises page then renders the records grouped by area, the daycare page pulls the daycare images, the boarding page pulls the accommodation images, and the home page picks four flagged as favourites. One upload, four pages, and replacing a photograph updates it everywhere.
Step 6: the premises page
One page, called The premises or Our place, linked from the header and from the daycare and boarding pages. Walk-through video at the top with its poster image. Then the photographs grouped by area in the order a dog experiences them, each with its caption and a short line saying what happens there and how many dogs share it. At the bottom, the team photograph with a link to Our team, and the Book button.
Nothing else on that page: no reviews widget, no map, no chat bubble competing with the images.
Step 7: spread them through the site
The rule is that an owner never reads about a space without seeing it. The daycare page shows the play area and the rest room. The boarding page shows the accommodation and the outdoor run. The daily routine page shows the kitchen and the morning walk. The assessment page shows reception, which is the room a new owner will walk into.
Step 8: keep it current
One photograph a month from the floor, captioned and dated, added as a record. The daily photo updates and report cards your software already sends are the easy source, covered by the permission gathered at booking. Every January, remove anything that no longer matches the building, and reshoot properly whenever you extend or refit.
Where this sits
Facilities photography and video, shot to a list, sized properly and built as records that feed a premises page and every service page, is the first of the six must-haves in a dog daycare and boarding website as we build it, and real premises photography runs through the rest of our pet business websites. The owner is visiting the building before they visit the building. Make that visit quick, honest and complete.