The Challenge:
Tiptoeing Around WordPress Landmines
Sundance Retrievers breeds, raises, and trains Labrador Retrievers at Willow Farm, a private 200-acre hunting preserve in northwestern Pennsylvania. Co-owners Sheryl and Scott Sundean place about 100 dogs a year as family companions, therapy dogs, and hunting partners. That's the most their kennel and small team can handle, with roughly 45 dogs in training at any time.
Their WordPress website was supposed to support that work. Instead, the team spent its days working around it. After a rebuild or two that hadn't delivered, Sundance had good reason to be skeptical of the next one.
- Lost work and broken pages. Routine edits could wipe out work or data, break parts of the live site, or interrupt communication with customers.
- Dog Journals built by hand. Every dog sold got its own private page, shared with the buyer through a private link. Dogs in the same training program needed nearly identical updates, so the team repeated them across dozens of journals. One round of updates could often take up to three days.
- Litters that were hard to follow. Buyers had no single, clear view of available puppies, upcoming litters, and the sires and dams behind them.
Sheryl put it plainly: "The market hasn't changed. It's the freaking website." What she wanted from an agency was just as clear: "I just want to train dogs. And I will happily pay you to let me train."
The Solution
Building Around the Way Sundance Works
Sundance didn't need another template website. It needed tools built around how the kennel breeds, sells, and trains dogs. Epic's design and development teams rebuilt the site on the epicPlatform, Epic's own content management system, and then built custom modules to take the most tedious admin work off Sundance's plate.
A Stable Foundation on the epicPlatform
Moving off WordPress cleared away the landmines. Sundance's team now adds dogs, updates litters, and edits pages without worrying about losing work or breaking the live site. Since the August 2026 launch, both the public website and the admin side have run reliably.
A Profile Card for Every Dog
Every puppy, sire, and dam now has a self-contained profile card, shown wherever that dog appears: Dogs for Sale, Sires, Dams, and Planned Litters. Each card includes:
- A photo and video gallery, plus a written description
- Expandable breeding and health details, including pedigree and DNA panel information
- For-sale statusÂ
- The training programs each puppy is best suited for
Anyone can now see at a glance what's happening with each new and upcoming litter, and that the parents come from excellent bloodlines.
The Dog Module: Update Once, Fill Every Journal
The Dog Module replaces dozens of hand-built journal pages. Trainers build training modules, with phases inside each one, and attach them to any training program. When a dog is enrolled in a program, its record fills in automatically with the information every dog in that program shares.
Trainers can still add notes, photos, and videos for an individual dog. Everything lives in one tabbed interface, so nothing gets copied, pasted, or retyped.
Shared updates flow from the program to every enrolled dog; one-off extras go to a single dog's journal.
Dog Journals Behind a Secure Login
Dog Journals now live in a customer portal. Buyers log in to follow their dog's training, with no private links to track, share, or lose.
Listening First, Building Second
The technical work was only half the job. Sundance came to Epic with plenty of questions, concerns, ideas, and requests, and with good reason to be cautious. In the early months, those arrived through a steady stream of emails, phone calls, and in-person visits.
Epic's team treated each one as a clue to what Sundance needed. The team pulled requests into one running list, confirmed with Sheryl how key features should work before building them, and kept refining the tools as the kennel put them to use. That patience earned something a launch alone can't: Sundance's trust.
The Result:
Selling Ahead of Pace
Sundance needs 8 to 9 sales or reservations a month to stay on track for its roughly 100-dog year. September beat that pace, and October passed it with nearly two weeks to spare.
Sales
- 12 dogs placed in September 2026, the new site's first full month
- 13 dogs placed in October 2026, meaning that Sundance placed three months’ worth of dogs in just two
Traffic
- 13,539 website visits in September, up 24% from August and 50% from September 2025
Buyers Noticed
- Buyers placing deposits on future litters pointed to the titles on the parents' profiles, which the new Planned Litters page puts front and center.
Time Back for the Team
- Dog Journal updates that once took days now fill in automatically from each training program.
- Routine edits no longer put work, data, or the live site at risk.
The new website didn't do it alone. From the start, Epic's paid digital marketing team aimed Sundance's campaigns at buyers ready for a trained Labrador, steering spend away from searches for subsidized service dogs, young untrained puppies, and general dog training. Paid search drove most of September's traffic growth.
I needed what no one else had been able to deliver. I am so happy to say that they hit this one out of the park. The website is a streamlined, functional work of art. The backend is easy to use and custom-built for me and my team. And the best part? I made a sale on the first day the new website launched.
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