The Bulldog Club of America is a site we spend a good portion of our time keeping up to date, mostly due to its extensive membership database and Bulldogger magazine sales. We are featuring this site even though it wasn’t our design. This site was designed by DC Website Designers. The BCA hired this design team that created and developed this website using Avada. As the BCA webmaster for the last few years on an outdated website based on html and an old wysiwyg editor we encouraged the club to make the decision to update to WordPress. We were not comfortable doing the design from the ground up as there is a membership database with custom code built into the site to implement several unique features that are not offered for the KISS (Keep it Super Simple) sites we develop. We were involved in choosing the designers specifying using WordPress as the base.

This was our first experience using the Avada Website Builder to maintain a website. It was an incredibly difficult learning curve compared to the themes we had been using. The design team, DCWD, gave us basic training in using Avada. After watching many videos from the Avada website and joining a Facebook Avada Users group we were able to grasp the complexity of setting up a fully responsive website with a multitude of elements built in. It has been quite a ride discovering all it is capable of. Avada continues to have additional elements added with each update. As both WordPress and Avada have evolved we have made a few improvements but not to the overall design.

BCA has a membership login area with almost 1400 members (2021 numbers). In 2021 we started offering our Bulldogger Magazine subscriptions and Ad sales through WooCommerce on the website. In 2023 we developed online membership forms and payments. Beginning in early 2024 we changed out WooCommerce for Gravity Stripe payments to include a form template to use with the Bulldogger ads.

We also welcomed a BCA IT person in 2022 to help in SEO, optimizing and overall website functions. This website, host and domain are all high traffic and use more resources than all our other sites combined!