Big Dog Pet Foods
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A fresh new site for a leading pet food brand.
A national pet-food brand had outgrown its own site, not because it was broken, but because every change ran through one developer. We rebuilt it to be owned by the whole team, and made it better for customers on the way through.
Making it future-proof.
Big Dog's site wasn't broken. It was well-built, good-looking and did the basics which is exactly what made it risky. It had been built to be run by one developer who carried every decision in their head. As the business grew and the team needed to make their own changes, that approach created a bottleneck.
Over four months, we rebuilt the site to be resilient, accessible, and safe for the team to own, giving it a visual and functional uplift along the way. We went further than a tidy-up: new customer-facing pages, a cleaner way to find products, and customised tools to help users make decisions.
At a Glance
Client: Big Dog Pet Foods - Leading Australian raw pet food brand
Scope: Structural refactor, UX, accessibility, SEO, custom build, governance & training.
Live: May 2026
The problem.
Most case studies open with a broken mess. This one doesn't.
The site looked good and worked. The catch was that it had one point of failure: only a developer understood how it worked and how to update it. Elements were created with custom css and code, making it difficult for a web editor to make changes without breaking styling, and nobody on the team could tell load-bearing code from safe-to-touch code. So the safest move was to change nothing and call the developer.
For a busy national brand producing content constantly, “call the developer for every change” isn't a workflow. It's a handbrake. The brief underneath the brief was simple: make it theirs.
Our approach.
We kept three principles front of mind throughout the whole project to keep our goal front of mind and ensure we delivered what our client needed.
01 - Webflow-native first.
Reach for the platform's own components before writing custom code. Custom code was what made the site fragile in the first place, so every native component swapped in is one less thing that can break.
02 - Staging first, always.
Everything was built and tested on a locked-down staging site before it went near the live one. A revenue-supporting website is never the place to experiment.
03 - Document as we go.
A full governance framework and handover documentation were built as deliverables, not an afterthought. This is the part that stops the fragility creeping back in six months.
A better way to find the right recipe.
The old product finder was heavily coded and didn't consider the user. We scrapped it and started fresh with a fun, quiz-style tool.
The user is guided through questions and receives a tailored set of recommendations back. We included personalisation, giving that individual touch that is not only common in the industry for this sort of tool, but creates a brand affinity for the user.
The clever part is invisible to the customer, but a huge win for our client. It's fully custom, but Big Dog's team has full control. The matching logic lives in the CMS as editable rules, not buried in code, so the team can fine tune what gets recommended without needing a developer.
A more friendly store locator.
Big Dog's store locator had a real usability problem: on a phone, the map trapped you. Try to scroll past it and you'd end up zooming the map instead of moving down the page, a small thing that's genuinely maddening when you're just trying to find a nearby stockist.
That got fixed. The map now requires two-finger interaction, so scrolling past it is effortless, and the whole thing got a visual overhaul to match, a cleaner layout, a modern map, and a branded pin. Underneath, the rebuild made it dramatically lighter and faster too, but the win customers feel is simpler: they can find a stockist without fighting the page.
Accessibility & SEO
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Good for everyone, better for Google.
Accessibility on the old site was patchy in the usual ways: missing alt text, headings structured wrong, links a screen reader couldn't name, colours that failed on contrast, forms without proper labels. Nothing unusual, and nothing anyone should ship in 2026.
We worked through it as a dedicated piece: proper heading structure, alt text managed at the asset level so it flows everywhere an image is used, ARIA labels where controls needed them, labelled form fields, and a full contrast pass signed off with Big Dog on the brand-colour calls. That closed the AA gaps that ran across most of the site's templates.
Here's the part a lot of people miss: this is the same body of work as good SEO. Correct headings, real text instead of words baked into images, and descriptive alt text serve a screen reader and a search crawler in exactly the same way. So alongside it, the site got full structured data it never had, product, FAQ, article and organisation markup, so search engines finally understand what each page is. One body of work, two payoffs.
The REdesign
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A site that looks the part, and sells like it.
The old site worked. It didn't work hard. This was the part of the project where we stopped stabilising and started improving, redesigning page after page against real user data and Big Dog's own brand direction, with one question behind every decision: is this making it easier for a customer to do the thing they came to do?
Homepage
We looked at the data for what users were trying to find first when landing on the homepage. The answer? The dog food range. This was hidden within a menu drop down. So we surfaced and didn't forget the cats! Plus we elevated proof points and navigational tools above the fold, without losing visual impact.
Dog food range
This page now works the way people expect online shopping to work. Filter down to the type you want, see the range at a glance, no endless scrolling to find the food that suits your dog. A familiar buying experience, built for a brand that sells through stockists rather than a cart.
Products
We revamped the product template to give users the information they need up front. Creating accordions made it easy for users to find relevant info without having to scroll. Many interactive elements were made more accessible and we created more opportunity to cross promote related products early on page.
Guides CMS Template
We overhauled the template used for Guides. Previously a single rich text field, the team now has the option to use a variety of components to better display their content, without having to leave the CMS. With hundreds of guides on the site, this is a key content area for the site and needed an experience lift.
Search & FAQs
These pages were rebuilt around how people actually look for things: clearer results, sensible filtering, and quick-jump navigation so answers are a tap away rather than a scroll away. FAQs also got quick copy and link buttons, an extra that is genuinely useful for the customer service team.
Guides page
We created a genuine filtered-content experience, custom-built so people can find relevant reading by category and keyword without bouncing between pages. Using a mix of Finsweet attributes and custom code, we developed a featured section as well as the useful filtering without a third-party plugin.
Health solutions pages
We created a suite of dedicated health solutions landing pages, with sectioned content to help users learn how to manage their dog's health concerns. We created combined collection lists to highlight products from different ranges, and developed components to showcase a variety of content types from video to podcasts.
The Result
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Where it landed.
Big Dog's website looks better than it did before and is now built for the people who actually run it. The fragile code is gone or rebuilt properly. Accessibility gaps that ran across most templates are closed. SEO foundations the site never had are in place. There's governance, documentation, and training so the gains hold. And customers have real new tools that didn't exist before.
The hardest projects are often the ones where the best work is the part nobody sees. This was one of those. The proof isn't in how different it looks. It's in who can safely run it now.
“Kat was instrumental in building and developing our new Big Dog Pet Foods website, delivering a polished and high-performing product that the business was thrilled with. She was exceptionally easy to work with, demonstrating a clear understanding of complex systems and translating our requirements into practical, effective solutions. I can not rate Kat any higher and would recommend Upstart Lane to anyone looking to deliver the best user experience for their customers.”
Pamela Olah • Marketing Manager, Big Dog Pet Foods.
