About GHHS
The Greater Huntsville Humane Society (GHHS) is a no-kill animal shelter and nonprofit in Huntsville, Alabama. Its website carries a lot: adoptable pets, a busy events calendar, volunteer applications, programs and fundraising campaigns. GHHS runs the site on WordPress and Elementor, and we support it.
The brief
The project had three parts:
- Redesign the site and rebuild the WordPress child theme it runs on, with faster and safer code underneath.
- Add an events calendar that staff manage in WordPress.
- Add a volunteer application that sorts people by the kind of service they’re doing.
A redesign on a rebuilt theme
We redesigned the site and rebuilt the GHHS child theme on Hello Elementor. We moved GHHS to Elementor when we took the site over years ago, and staff edit pages there, so Elementor Pro still owns the page layouts. Underneath, older event listings are now cached, database queries do less work, debug tools stay off on the live site, and any HTML passed into the apps is cleaned on the server first.
The events calendar
Events have their own post type in WordPress. A React app, built with Vite and placed on pages with a shortcode, shows them three ways: a list, a grid of event cards, or a calendar with month, week, day and agenda views. Visitors can search, filter by category and sort by date.
Each event still gets its own page, laid out in Elementor so it matches the rest of the site. The older event posts stayed where they were and ran out on their own, so nothing had to be migrated.
The volunteer application
People volunteer at GHHS for different reasons, and each reason needs different information. The application starts with one question: free-will volunteer, court-appointed community service, school-appointed community service, or school and program credit. Each answer opens its own set of steps. Groups are pointed to the volunteer coordinator.
Behind the form:
- React Hook Form and Zod check answers before anything is sent.
- Applicants under 19 get a parental consent checkbox.
- Uploaded files are checked on the server.
- Every application is saved in WordPress, where staff mark it New, Reviewed, Accepted or Declined and can export the list to CSV.
- Each application is emailed to the staff inbox that handles that type.
Before launch, we worked through a round of changes from GHHS staff: clearer wording for school credit, a lower upload limit, and more answers for how people heard about GHHS.
Adoptable pets from ShelterLuv
GHHS uses ShelterLuv for its animals. Our ShelterLuv plugin is one of our longest-running projects: a WordPress plugin, built in React, that brings adoptable pets onto the site. Visitors filter by type, age, size and sex, search by name, breed or color, and open a page for each animal. Sponsored pets have their own filters, so an event page can show just one sponsor’s pets.
Ongoing support
We also handle day-to-day web and design requests for GHHS: event pages, blog posts, social graphics and flyers. For ADOPTober 2026, we built the month’s event page in Elementor.
From launch through mid-October 2026, compared with the same dates a year earlier, visitors to the volunteer application rose from 636 to 965, visitors to the events page went from 224 to 443, and overall traffic held steady at about 54,000 visitors.
For another animal welfare nonprofit, see Lake Martin Animal Rescue, or read about our systems and integrations work.