PetRaters.com
A U.S.-market pet product review and affiliate content site.
Personal Project
Project overview
PetRaters.com publishes pet product reviews and buying guides for a U.S. audience. The site needed a structure that could hold a growing library of review content while staying fast and easy to maintain.
The challenge
Content sites like this live or die on two things: how easily new content can be published, and how well the site performs as that content library grows. A generic setup tends to slow down or become hard to manage as the number of pages increases.
The solution
The site is built on a custom PHP and MySQL foundation, with a content structure designed specifically for review-style articles — ratings, product details, and comparison-friendly layouts — rather than a generic blog template.
Technology
Features
- A content structure built around product reviews and ratings rather than generic blog posts
- Custom PHP/MySQL backend for managing and publishing content
- SEO-friendly URL structure and page layout for search visibility
Development process
The build followed the same core process used on client projects: understanding the content and audience first, then designing a database and page structure around how the content actually needs to be organized and found.
Lessons learned
Content-heavy sites benefit from a purpose-built structure early on — retrofitting a generic template to handle structured content (ratings, comparisons, categories) later is far more work than planning for it from the start.