Your public site

Every rescue on RescueConsole has a public website at its own address. It lists your adoptable animals, each with a page of its own, and carries the pages you write, your published forms, your upcoming events and a way to give. It is built from your records, so an animal you list or an event you publish appears without anything else to do. You manage it under Settings → Organization → Public page, which is described as “What the world sees, and how to put it on your own website.” Anybody who can open Settings can read the page. Changing the pages, the menu, the colors and the domains needs the Organization admin role.

​

The pages of your site

Every page carries your logo at the top, your menu if you have one, and a footer with your name and a Login to RescueConsole link. The sign-in to RescueConsole itself is at /app on the same address. If your organization’s account is suspended, the site is not shown, and Settings → Organization → Public page says “Not published”.

​

Deciding what is public

An animal appears on your site only when both of these are true:

1. Its status is one you mark public, under Settings → Animal management → Animal statuses. Every status starts private, so nothing shows until you mark at least one (usually “Available”). The card lists the statuses that are public now.
2. Visibility is turned on on the animal’s own record.

An animal needs both. Moving an animal to a private status takes it off the site at once, without anybody having to remember to turn its visibility off.

​

What is showing right now

This card says how many animals the public can see. When the answer is none, it says which of the two is missing: no status is marked public yet, or no animal in a public status has Visibility turned on. See exactly what the public sees opens the list of animals the public gets, as raw data.

​

Adoptable animals

The adoption page, and any page with an Adoptable animals section, shows your public animals as a grid of cards, up to 24, the most recently added first. The heading counts all of them, such as “12 animals looking for a home”, unless you give the section a heading of your own. With none listed, it says “No animals are listed for adoption right now. Please check back soon.” Each card shows the animal’s photo, its name, a line with its species, breed, sex and age, and up to three of its website attributes.

​

The animal page

Pressing a card opens the animal’s own page, which shows:

• the profile photo, whole rather than cropped,
• its name: the External name if it has one, otherwise its name,
• species, breed (with the variety where there is one), sex, and age worked out from its date of birth,
• its attributes marked Website under Settings → Animal management → Behaviour,
• the description,
• Adoption fee, when one is set,
• Before you apply: what you tell adopters for any attribute marked Tell adopters, in your own words,
• Get in touch: your email, phone and address.

When somebody shares an animal’s page, the link preview shows that animal’s photo.

​

What the public data carries

Behind the pages, the public data for each animal is: its external name (or its name), species, breed and variety, sex, date of birth, description, whether it is spayed or neutered, its ID, its adoption fee, its status by its public name, its profile photo, its website attributes and what you tell adopters. The embedded widget on your own website reads the same data.

​

What is never public

These never leave RescueConsole through your site, the widget or the public data, whatever you do:

• the microchip number,
• the health status and anything on the Medical tab,
• your custom fields,
• which kennel or unit it is in,
• who adopted it, and anything about the people linked to it,
• intake and surrender reasons,
• notes, tasks and documents,
• the answers under What this home needs (see the animal record),
• the internal name, when an external name is set.

An animal that is not public is not found at its address either. Its page says “This page is not available”, exactly as for an address that does not exist.

​

Editing a page

Your pages lists Home (/), Adoption page (/adopt) and every page you have added, each with its address and how many sections it has. Press Edit beside one. A page is a list of sections, in the order visitors see them. Your logo, name and description are always at the top of every page, and the adoption page always starts with your available animals, above its sections. On a page you added, you can also change the Page name and the Address. An address uses lower-case letters, numbers and hyphens, such as about-us. It cannot be one your site already uses (adopt, events, app, api or webhooks) or one another page has. Add sections from Add a section…, move them with the arrows, and remove them with the bin. Nothing changes on your site until you press Save page. Discard throws your changes away. All pages goes back to the list. A page holds at most 12 sections.

​

Sections

Every section has an optional Heading.

​

Adding and removing pages

Add a page adds a page called “New page” and opens it for editing. You can have up to 10 pages of your own, besides the home and adoption pages. The bin beside a page removes it straight away, with everything on it. A menu link or button that pointed at it then leads nowhere, so change those too.

​

Starting from the standard site

While your site is still untouched, Your pages offers Start with a standard rescue site? with Add the standard pages. It fills in:

• the home page, with a mission paragraph, buttons to meet the animals, donate and volunteer, your animals, what is coming up, and your contact details,
• the adoption page, with how adopting works and your adoption application,
• pages for Donate, Volunteer, Foster, About us, Resources & surrender, and Contact,
• a menu linking them all.

Every paragraph is a prompt that says what belongs there, written to be replaced. Where you already have a published form of the right kind, it is placed on its page: your adoption, volunteer, foster, surrender and contact forms. Where you have no adoption, volunteer, foster or surrender form yet, the page says which form to build.

​

The menu

Menu holds the links across the top of every page, each a label and an address. Leave it empty if you only have one page. Press Save menu when you are done.

​

Colors

Colors sets how the site looks. Nothing changes until you press Save colors.

• Themes: a complete look to start from (Classic, Modern, Warm, Meadow, Night or Berry), each setting the four choices below. Everything stays editable afterwards.
• Ready-made: six accent colors: Teal, Forest, Ocean, Plum, Clay and Slate.
• Accent color: any color you like, for links and anything highlighted. Use the default goes back to teal. How it will look shows it on a light and a dark background. Your site lightens or darkens the shade where it would be hard to read, keeping the color.
• Light or dark: Follow the visitor, Always light or Always dark.
• Logo and menu: Centred (logo above your name, menu underneath), Across the top (logo on the left, menu on the right) or Ranged left. On a phone every arrangement centres.
• Type: Plain, Serif or Rounded.

The background and text colors are not yours to change, so the site stays readable.

​

Logo, name and description

Your logo, organization name and description are set under Settings → Organization → General profile, not here. The logo appears at the top of every page. When you have a logo, it stands in for your name at the top of the home page, so the name is not printed twice.

​

Your own domain

Your site is always at the address Your own domain shows as Always available. You can add an address of your own, such as adopt.contoso.org, to send people there instead. Both keep working. Remove takes a domain off straight away. The address your site is always at cannot be removed, because it is how you sign in. You can add up to 10 domains. An address under rescueconsole.com cannot be added: you already have one. Adding and removing domains needs the Organization admin role.

​

Put it on your website

Put it on your website builds a short piece of code to paste into a website you already have, on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or anywhere you can add HTML. It updates itself, so you paste it once. Under Show, choose what it shows: Link to the animal on your hosted site makes each animal link to its page on your RescueConsole site. Put it inside places it inside an element of your page (such as #animals) rather than where you paste the code. Press Copy and paste it into your site. The widget only ever shows what is already public, and keeps to its own corner of your page: it cannot change how the rest of your site looks. To style it, add data-css to the code.

​

Forms on your site

A published form can be on your site in two ways: on its own page at /f/ and its address, or as A form section on any page. Build and publish forms under Settings → Operations & forms → Forms. A form section offers your published forms by title. If a form is unpublished later, the section shows nothing on your site, and the page editor says “This form is no longer published, so nothing shows on your site.” Everything sent through a form arrives in Submissions.

​

Events

Your published, upcoming events appear in the What is coming up section (up to 12, soonest first), on the /events page, and each on a page of its own. An event stays listed until the day after it starts. A cancelled event is not shown. See Events. An event’s page shows its date and time, where it is, its description, a Register button when it has a registration link, a Let us know you’re coming button when it has a form, and Who you can meet: the animals on the event. Only animals that are public appear there. Putting an animal on an event does not publish it. Events on your site on the settings page links straight to Edit the home page, where the What is coming up section is added or moved.

​

Donating

A Donate section takes a gift by card through your own Stripe account. It shows nothing until Stripe is connected under Settings → Finance & adoption → Payments. See Finance settings. The visitor chooses one of your amounts from Settings → Finance & adoption → Donation amounts (the first is chosen for them), or types Or another amount, gives Your name and Email, for your receipt, and presses Donate. Depending on your payment settings, they may be offered a box to add about 3% to cover card processing. They finish on Stripe’s own page, then come back to a thank-you on your site. Stripe emails the receipt. Each gift is recorded in Donations once Stripe confirms it. Your site also holds the page an adopter pays their adoption fee on, reached only from a link your team sends. See Adoptions.

​

The wish list

Your site does not show your wish list by itself. The standard Donate page has a button called “Our wish list” that points at your Contact page: change its address to wherever you keep your list, or remove it.