Cheryl Trust: Website, Bookings and Memberships for an Animal Behaviourist, Charity and Dog Park

Cheryl McDonough is a Trust Technique® practitioner and animal behaviourist based in Wellington, New Zealand, working with both dogs and horses. Alongside her one-to-one sessions she runs a registered charitable trust and a canine adventure park: a private, members-only space where dogs can play off-lead.

That's three different things to run from one website: a professional service business, a charity and a membership-based park. Cheryl already had a website, but it needed an upgrade to handle bookings, memberships and payments properly.

The challenge

Cheryl needed a single platform that could:

• present her dog and horse services, the Trust Technique, the charity and the adventure park clearly
• let park members join, book sessions and manage their own bookings
• support different types of membership
• take payments online
• give her an admin area to run it all without technical help

What we built

A new public website

A rebuilt website covering her services for dogs and horses, the Trust Technique, the charitable trust, the canine adventure park, a dog photo gallery and client testimonials, with clear paths to enquire, book or donate.

A member portal

Park members get their own login where they can:

• manage their profile and their registered dogs, including neutering and vaccination status
• see upcoming sessions and book new ones
• reschedule or cancel bookings themselves, with changes locked inside a set window before a session starts so the park isn't left with last-minute gaps
• view their active membership and past sessions
• leave a review after a session

An admin system

Behind the scenes, Cheryl has one dashboard to manage the whole business:

• Bookings and calendar for park sessions and services
• Membership packages and booking packages, with Stripe for payments
• Service plans with pricing that appears automatically on the website
• Vouchers
• Clients and their dogs
• Opening hours and slot settings for each day, including session length and buffer time between bookings
• Park closures and blackout dates, so maintenance days or bad weather block bookings automatically
• An email broadcast tool to message clients, filtered by membership status (for example active, expired, or no package)
• Testimonials with an approval queue, and the dog gallery

Technology

• Next.js for the website, member portal and admin system in one codebase
• MongoDB for members, dogs, bookings, memberships and content
• Stripe for online payments

The project took around two to three months.

The result

• Members can book and manage park sessions online, and memberships and payments are handled in one place
• Cheryl can update services, pricing, opening hours, closures and content herself
• Day-to-day admin is much easier to manage, with bookings, members, payments and communication in a single system

We continue to work with Cheryl on the platform.

Building something similar?

If you run a membership, venue or appointment-based business and are juggling bookings, payments and member communication across different tools, we can bring it together in one system. Tell us about your project and we'll get back to you with a free design.