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Design and Development
Dog & Meow
01 Overview
Getting a pet for the first time is one of those life moments that comes with an enormous amount of questions and very little reliable guidance in one place. Forums exist. Reddit threads exist. Individual blogs exist. But a place that brought all of it together, a real community of people who genuinely loved their animals, organized around practical help and shared joy, did not really exist in the way it could.
Dog and Meow was built to be that place. Not just a resource, but a community. Somewhere a new puppy owner could ask a question and get an answer from someone who had been through it before. Somewhere a cat person could share a ridiculous photo and find an audience that appreciated it. A platform that took the bond between people and their pets seriously and built a digital home around it.
Company
Dog and Meow
Timeline
4 months (2017–2018)
Role
Full Stack Developer
Platforms
Desktop Web, Mobile Web
Stack
HTML, Javascript, JQuery, CSS, PHP (Custom Simple Machines Theme Development)
Tools
VS Code, Sketchapp, Invision, Adobe Photoshop, Github
02 Idea
Community first, the grow everything else from that.
The core of Dog and Meow was the community. A forum where pet owners could create their own discussion topics, answer questions from others, and build a collective body of knowledge that got more useful with every member who joined. The forum was structured to serve both new owners looking for guidance and experienced ones who had things worth sharing.
Alongside the forum, two additional features were planned from the start. A media section where members could share funny or memorable photos and videos of their pets, with the ability to comment and share content to social platforms through embeds. And a store offering custom merchandise, pet goods, and branded items that members would actually want.
The founding idea
A place where pet owners actually want to spend time, not just look things up and leave.
Community
Forum with open topics
Members could create their own discussion topics or participate in existing ones. New owners could ask questions and receive answers from experienced community members, building a practical, peer-sourced knowledge base over time.
Guides
Curated owner guides
Editorial guides covering first-time ownership, training, nutrition, and care, organized to be immediately useful to someone who just brought home a new pet and did not know where to start.
Media
Funny photos and video sharing
A dedicated section for sharing pet photos and videos with the community, with commenting and embeddable sharing so content could travel to Instagram and other platforms while still driving traffic back to Dog and Meow.
Store
Custom merchandise and pet goods
A store offering branded merchandise, custom items like t-shirts and phone cases, home decor, and curated pet goods, creating a revenue stream tied directly to the community's identity.
03 Solution
Built to grow with the community that used it.
WordPress handled the editorial and content side of the platform, giving the site the structure needed for guides, blog content, and the homepage without requiring a custom CMS build. Simple Machines Forum ran the community layer, providing a mature and stable forum platform that could handle the discussion, threading, and member management a community of this kind required.
The two systems were integrated into a cohesive experience through the design. The goal was for a visitor to move naturally between reading a guide, asking a question in the forum, and watching a video without feeling like they had stepped between disconnected products. The design held that together, giving Dog and Meow a unified visual identity across its different functions.
The embed-based media sharing model was a deliberate choice for distribution. Rather than trying to compete with Instagram or TikTok as a destination for pet content, the approach was to let content live there while tying it back to Dog and Meow as the original source. Members posting from the platform could reach their existing social audiences and bring new visitors back through the embed.
The Longer Vision
The digital platform was always intended as the foundation for something larger. If the community reached the scale needed to support it, two further phases were planned.
Phase 1
Digital community platform
Forum, guides, media sharing, and store. The initial launch and the foundation everything else would grow from.
LaunchedPhase 2 · Future
Physical retail store
A brick-and-mortar pet store in the spirit of PetSmart, building on the community and brand trust established through the digital platform.
Future phasePhase 3 · Future
Pet adoption center
An adoption center giving the community a direct way to act on their love of animals, connecting pets in need with the owners Dog and Meow had already brought together.
Future phase
04 My role
Designed, built, and brought to life.
I designed and built Dog and Meow from scratch. That covered the visual design and brand identity, the WordPress setup and theme, the Simple Machines Forum integration, the editorial content structure, and the store. The design challenge was making a platform with multiple distinct functions (forum, guides, media, store) feel like a single coherent place rather than a collection of tools sitting next to each other.
The forum integration required the most care. Simple Machines is a robust platform but it has its own visual language, and making it feel native to the Dog and Meow design rather than bolted on required meaningful customization. The goal was for a member moving from the homepage into the forum to feel like they were still in the same space, not switching applications.
The vision for Dog and Meow was always bigger than a website. The digital community was the starting point for something that could eventually have a physical presence. Getting the community right was the prerequisite for all of it, and the 2027 relaunch is a chance to do that with a stronger foundation and a clearer understanding of what the community actually needs.