Saskia Teichmann
In September 2023, I received an email from the board of Hannover’s animal welfare association. It was about a new website for the animal shelter and the Tierschutzverein Hannover und Umgegend e .V.. The existing site had grown over many years and become difficult to navigate; some content and links were out of date. Anyone looking for information about the animals or the association struggled to find their way around.
I had already discussed most of the broad concept for the new site with the association in our preliminary conversations. Once the proposal had been accepted and the work commissioned, I brought in my design partner. He developed the concept and design with the shelter team in several on-site workshops; I handled the entire technical implementation and helped guide the remaining decisions through to launch.
From the initial concept to launch
Appealing, emotionally engaging imagery was intended to convey the animal welfare association’s message and guiding principles. Alongside the technical work, I also developed content. We continued to agree the details throughout development and in the run-up to launch.
There was a lengthy period between design approval and the completed website while the content was being gathered. At an animal shelter, that work has to fit around an operation whose day-to-day priority is caring for animals. Implementation and final approval were complete by the end of May 2026; the new website went live on 30 May.
An important part of my work was translating the shelter’s processes into the website. Someone interested in an animal needs different information from someone who wants to support the association or plan a visit. At the same time, the team needs to be able to maintain the content without re-entering the same information in several places.
For example, the shelter opens to visitors on the second and last Saturday of every month. If you are planning a visit, you want to see the upcoming dates, not work out for yourself which Saturdays that means. The website therefore needed to show the actual dates.
I developed a function that calculates the visiting days and connected the Sugar Calendar events calendar to it. The upcoming dates now appear directly in the visiting-day overview and the calendar. There is a dedicated section for cancellations and other exceptions where the team only needs to enter the change. Staff therefore do not have to keep creating new events or delete a regular event when it is cancelled.
Animals that belong together need to appear together
The information also needs to fit together when animals are being rehomed. A profile can say a great deal about an individual animal. But if that animal can only be rehomed together with another, the website needs to understand that connection. A passing sentence in a text is not enough: the information is also needed in the directory and when someone makes an enquiry.
I therefore built group rehoming as a defined relationship between the animals. The team links the animals that belong together, and the system takes that connection into account on both sides. The directory can be filtered specifically for animals being rehomed together. Animal type and care requirements also help narrow down the selection.
The profile leads to an enquiry about the animal. The selected animal’s details are carried over, and the questions adapt to the animal type. Someone interested in a cat should not have to work through questions about keeping a dog first. The team can still see which animal an enquiry concerns, while prospective adopters continue the process they began in the directory.
The decision about whether an animal and a person are a good match is, of course, the shelter’s. My job is to bring the relevant information together sensibly and remove unnecessary data entry. To do that, I need to understand how rehoming works before deciding how fields, forms and pages should connect.
Supporting the association also needed to be possible directly through the website. The new membership application can be completed and submitted entirely online. Between the launch on 30 May and 6 September 2026, 27 membership applications were submitted through it. The association reviews the applications and then confirms the memberships itself.
How we organise work on the advice articles
Bettina Schade now leads the content work. Together with her and the association’s chair, Mr Schwarzfeld, I organised the editorial work and developed a clear way of working. Everyone should be able to find their way around the system, and maintaining the content needs to be manageable alongside the shelter’s daily tasks.
For the advice articles, the first step was to turn a large collection into a manageable sequence of tasks. I prioritised topics about conditions affecting animals that were currently waiting for a home and took into account what people were searching for on Google. I also put together a manageable task list and specific instructions for editing and subject-matter review.
This selection connects the editorial work with rehoming. Someone who reads an animal’s profile and comes across a medical condition needs understandable information to consider whether they could take that animal in. At the same time, the team has a clearer picture of which advice article matters next. Publication of the articles is still in progress; it is an ongoing editorial task that I have broken down into manageable steps for the team and the vet.
Bianka contributes to the animal shelter project
For ongoing content maintenance, I also designed “Bianka”, an AI editor dedicated to this project. I am particularly proud of her. She works within this project with fixed rules, approved sources and a memory of her own. This means the shelter’s tone of voice and the limits of her work do not have to be explained again with every assignment.
Bianka checks spelling, grammar and punctuation, for example, but also whether the wording is understandable, makes sense and fits the shelter’s style. She looks for outdated or missing internal links and suggests appropriate changes. From the beginning of July to 6 September 2026, she revised the language of existing, already published content in 288 documented editing steps.
Within her defined remit, she may make clear language corrections herself if they do not change the meaning. Changes in meaning, new links and medically sensitive statements require human approval. She also reviews image descriptions; here, she may only correct what can be clearly substantiated by the image or its context. She may not publish new content herself. Bianka can do more, but for reasons of discretion and security, I will not go into further detail here.
This boundary is particularly important for an animal shelter’s website. A sentence can read well and still be factually wrong, and an animal cannot be reliably assessed from a photograph. Bianka is meant to take on recurring editorial work without taking over decisions for which the team and I must remain responsible. I explain the underlying idea behind agents like this in more detail in my Agents-Brain workshop series.
Animal welfare makes this project especially close to my heart. For me, that also includes the less visible work after launch: organising the next pieces of content with Bettina, listening to feedback from everyday use and developing features further so the team can work well with them.
Sources
- Tierheim Hannover – website and visiting days
- Animal rehoming at Tierheim Hannover
- Online membership application
- My own project records, technical documentation and discussions with the shelter team; aggregated form and editorial analyses up to 6 September 2026.
