More Website Updates Incoming

More Doggy Stars website updates are coming!

Here are the quick facts:

• The website is getting a complete overhaul, focused on putting our dog training services front and center.

• Dog training prices are going to increase to match market value.

• Old blog posts are being updated to better match SEO, including updating categories, adding tags, making sure all photos have alt text, and more.

• Our logo and color scheme are also being updated to be more readable.

Website Overhaul

Over the last year or so, we've added dog training services to this website, including private training (both online and in-person), membership for social groups, and the beginning of our online library of videos and courses to help you train your dog on your own. However, we've kind of come at all those additions piecemeal and while we believe these are all good additions, it has made the website far more clunky and less useful.

So, with that in mind, we're completely redoing the website. It will still have some of the same things you've come to expect from us--being up-front and sharing knowledge--but it will also be better organized and follow more "best business practices."

With that said, we're not planning to clutter this place up with ads or make this a place that is focused first on money. Not at all! We still want to be who we are and still help people, but hopefully we can also use these updates to help afford life as prices have continued to skyrocket and, unfortunately, being disabled in the US is expensive.

Training Price Increase

Along those lines, I'll admit that money is tight and when I opened my new dog training business under the name Doggy Stars I wanted to keep prices affordable so everyone can get the help they need to get the dog they want. Unfortunately, I've realized two very important things:

1. Life continues getting more expensive at an unprecedented rate and being disabled (let alone training a new service dog) drains finances extremely quickly.

2. The fair market value for dog training in my area is much higher than I was charging (even for dog trainers who are much less experienced), which means that I've been hurting myself to help others and I can't afford to do that anymore.

So, once the new website is ready (hopefully by the end of August, though it may be sooner), the prices that are being charged for dog training, whether in-person or virtual, are going to increase to better match the worth of the services that I am offering.

Old Article Updates

So, inline with updating the website, we are going through and updating old articles. Mostly, these are very minor changes like adding alt text to images to be more accessible and cleaning up categories and replacing some categories with tags so that it's easier to find posts. Hopefully, this won't inundate anyone on the mailing list with tons of emails. Also, we hope that this will benefit everyone, both those new to Doggy Stars and those who have been subscribed for years.

Logo and Color Updates

Similarly, we are updating our logo and color scheme with accessibility in mind. Our current logo is very pretty, but can be very hard to read. Having the extremely dark navy blue as one of our main colors can also make some things harder to read. Being inaccessible is completely against what we stand for, so we are updating things to (hopefully!) be more legible and easier for more folks to see and read without trouble or strain. With that in mind, I'll give you the first look at our new logo:

We hope you are as happy with these changes as we are. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to us via our contact page (which will soon be at the bottom of our About page) or by emailing us at info AT doggystars DOT dog.