GREYT ANGELS — CASE STUDY
From 86% bot traffic to two clicks to a retired racing greyhound
A rescue’s front door — audited, designed, and engineered solo for greytangels.org.
Visit the live sitePAGES SHIPPED TO PRODUCTION
16An end-to-end redesign of a live nonprofit’s site, shipped to production — six core pages rebuilt on their existing URLs, ten net-new, eight shared components, and all 22 production URLs verified live at 0.25% pixel-diff to the design build.
Honest by construction — every number on it verified.
WHY RESCUES EXIST — U.S. GREYHOUND RACING
50+2TRACKS ACROSS 19 STATES — 1980s PEAKTRACKS TODAY — BOTH IN WEST VIRGINIA
The industry didn’t reform — it collapsed. Forty-four states have banned commercial dog racing, and when Florida (two-thirds of the industry) voted it out 69–31 in 2018, thousands of dogs needed somewhere to go at once. Rescues absorbed the fallout.
A racing career ends around age four. A greyhound lives to fifteen. Rescues fill the decade in between.
THE LAST STATE’S OWN RECORDS
- 5,647 injuries and at least 123 deaths at the final two tracks, 2015–2024 — West Virginia Racing Commission records.
- 627 injuries in a single year, including 189 broken bones.
THE MATH FOR RESCUES
- Dogs registered to race fell 76% in twelve years — every retired dog still needed a home.
- Retirement comes with roughly half a lifetime still ahead.
THE FRONT DOOR — BEFORE & AFTER
The blog was the homepage. A visitor arriving to adopt a greyhound landed on a feed of posts and had to work out where to go next. The redesign made the blog a page of its own and gave the front door one job.
PROBLEM
A blog wearing a homepage.
- Blog-as-homepageThe front door was a reverse-chronological feed. First-time visitors met announcements, not hounds.
- The hounds were buriedAvailable dogs sat behind menu layers with no consistent profiles — every adoption started with a search.
- A mark without wingsThe old identity carried none of the warmth or credibility
the mission had earned over a decade of placements.
SOLUTION
Built around the dogs.
- Two clicks to a houndHome leads to Available Hounds; every dog gets a full profile — photos, temperament, and a clear adopt path.
- A flying greyhound — nothing cheesierThe new mark gives the rescue wings without halos or pegasus kitsch — drawn to hold from favicon to banner.
- Warmth as a systemP22 Mackinac and Acumin over warm bone — teal for action, amber for the hounds, one legible voice on every page.
THE MARK
GIVING
Giving,
without the maze.
One donation module — amount, purpose, and payment in one place — replacing a donate page that had no working way to give.
UNDER THE HOOD
Templates, components,
and the publish pipeline.
The deeper rebuild wasn't visual. Sixteen pages designed in Paper, built to working code on localhost, and carried into Odoo's CMS — eight shared components, so a card or nav fix lands everywhere at once — QA'd against the design at 0.25% pixel-diff before anything shipped. The client still edits everything in Odoo.
- CANVAS — PAPEREvery page drawn first.
- AI BUILD — CLAUDE CODECanvas to working code, localhost first.
- LIVE — ODOO CMSTransferred in — still editable by the client.
Plus a custom MCP server — a scripted publishing
interface to the client's CMS: view edits, publishing,
and analytics pulls as commands, not dashboard clicks.
Have a design that needs a developer? I receive my own handoffs — and ship them.
LAUNCH DAY — FIRST 18 HOURS
8%41%
In the first 18 hours: multi-page visits jumped from 8% to 41%, donate’s share of pageviews rose from 2.4% to 9.3%, and Facebook referrals beat the prior six months combined — but the numbers that matter are measured over months.
Honest metrics beat launch spikes.
KEY INSIGHTS
- Adopters come for a dog, not an org chart.
- Reported traffic was ~86% bots; the CRM was ~95% spam.
- A ~100-year API token sat in the page HTML — removed before launch.
LEARNINGS & TAKEAWAYS
- Honest by construction: a fabricated “312 placed” became verified 34 adoptions.
- Design the handoff to yourself.
- An MCP server turns maintenance into conversation.
GET IN TOUCH
The race is over. The work isn’t.Let’s talk.
Open for creative technologist / design engineer / senior graphic design roles
Matthew Kenney
Designer at Podcast Monkey, USA.