Dog Business School

2026 · WordPress, PHP, Javascript, Divi 4, ACF Pro, Divi Machine, WooCommerce, Edwiser Bridge, Moodle, Cloudways

About This Project

Dog Business School is the flagship project of Randle Stonier, trading as Polka Dot Consulting Limited. It's a UK-based provider of Ofqual-regulated dog care qualifications and professional business training, and one of the genuine leaders in the sector. The core audience is dog walkers, home boarders, day care providers, kennels operators, and breeders who need qualifications to meet council licensing requirements under DEFRA's Animal Welfare Regulations 2018.

I've been working with Randle since early 2017. It started with a £100 job to make some minor edits on his website. The work grew from there, and so did the relationship. Over the years Randle has become more than a client. His extensive business experience has made him something of a mentor to me on the business side of things, and for that reason the Dog Business School project is one I hold pretty close.

What started as small edits eventually became a full website rebuild, then a complete platform migration, then an ongoing partnership covering development, infrastructure, SEO, security, and strategy. It's the longest-running client relationship I have, and it's the project that best represents how I work.

The Rebuild

The original Dog Business School website was built in WordPress, but it was essentially static. Every piece of content was written directly into the page builder. If a course price changed, or an awarding body updated a qualification title, someone had to go through every single page where that information appeared and update it by hand. For a growing site with a growing catalogue of courses, that didn't scale. A single course might have its price, its TQT hours, or its regulatory details referenced in five or six different places across the site. One missed update and you've got contradictory information visible to potential students.

The rebuild was designed around solving that problem. ACF Pro became the backbone of the entire site. Every course, every service, every piece of content that appears in more than one place is stored in a structured field and rendered dynamically wherever it's needed. Change a course price in one ACF field and it updates on the course page, the archive card, the bundle listing, and anywhere else it's referenced, all simultaneously. Randle can update any course detail in a set of clearly labelled fields without ever touching the page builder.

The stack is WordPress with Divi 4 as the page builder, Divi Machine for dynamic content rendering, and WooCommerce handling the shop with Stripe powering payments including Klarna buy-now-pay-later integration. Edwiser Bridge connects WordPress to a Moodle learning management system where the actual course content lives. The site is hosted on Cloudways and sits behind Cloudflare.

There are two custom post types at the heart of the site. "Our Courses" holds the full course catalogue, each entry with extensive ACF fields covering everything from qualification details, awarding body information, TQT hours, and pricing through to course outlines, FAQs, and regulatory information. "Services and Resources" covers the non-course offerings like licensing guidance packs and business support materials. Both post types use Divi Theme Builder templates to render their archive and single pages, pulling all their content dynamically from ACF fields.

Course Card Popups

One of the features I'm most pleased with is the course card hover system. On the courses archive page, hovering over any course card brings up a popup showing key details: course title, estimated study time, regulatory information, and an introduction. The idea was borrowed from how Udemy handles course browsing, where you can quickly scan courses without clicking through to each one.

It's built with Tippy.js for the tooltip rendering and a custom AJAX endpoint that fetches ACF field data for each course on demand. The popup only loads data when you actually hover, so the initial page load stays fast. On mobile, the behaviour switches to tap-to-reveal since hover doesn't exist on touchscreens.

Getting this to play nicely with Divi Machine's asynchronous content loading was one of the trickier parts. Divi Machine loads course cards via AJAX when you filter or paginate, which means the popup event listeners need to be reattached every time new content appears in the DOM. The solution uses a combination of Divi Machine's custom events and a debounced MutationObserver to detect when new cards have been injected and wire them up.

The FAQ System

Dog Business School has a comprehensive FAQ section with category filtering, real-time search, and keyboard shortcuts. The FAQs are stored as ACF repeater fields and rendered with custom PHP. Individual course pages also have their own FAQ sections, so students can find answers specific to the course they're looking at without having to navigate away.

The FAQ system was built to be easy for the team to maintain. Adding a new question is just a matter of filling in ACF fields, assigning it to a category, and it appears on the site with the right filtering and search behaviour automatically. No template editing required.

The Migration

The hosting migration from SiteGround to Cloudways was a significant undertaking. This wasn't a simple site copy. It involved migrating the full user base, years of WooCommerce order history, all product-to-Moodle-course relationships, coupon codes, and subscription data, all while keeping the connection to the existing Moodle instance intact.

The migration had to account for differences between the old and new environments. The old site used legacy WooCommerce order storage, while the new site was configured for High-Performance Order Storage. The Edwiser Bridge course links all needed to be re-established because the Moodle sync generates new post IDs on the new WordPress installation.

I wrote a detailed migration plan document covering the order of operations, database table dependencies, rollback procedures, and post-migration verification steps. The actual migration was done over a weekend, with custom PHP scripts handling the Edwiser Bridge re-linking and a structured import/export process for the WooCommerce data. Every product, order, user, and course relationship was verified afterwards.

Security

Security is an ongoing priority for the project. Dog Business School's position as a sector leader makes it a target, and the site has been subject to attempted attacks in the past. The proactive security measures in place ensured these attempts were caught and dealt with before any damage was done.

Any website that gains traction online becomes a target. It's not a matter of if, it's when. Automated bots, brute force attempts, and spam injection campaigns are a daily reality for any site with decent traffic, and Dog Business School is no exception. That sounds scary, but it's genuinely just business as usual for running a popular website in 2026.

The key isn't preventing every single attempt. It's making sure you're never caught off guard. That means keeping WordPress core, plugins, and themes updated promptly, monitoring for anything unusual, and staying on top of what's happening in the wider WordPress security landscape. When a vulnerability is disclosed in a plugin, I want to know about it before it becomes a problem, not after. Dog Business School's infrastructure is built on industry-leading hosting and security tools, and the site is actively maintained to stay that way.

Product Bundles and Licensing Guidance

The business has evolved from selling individual courses to offering structured bundles that combine qualifications with practical licensing support. The Super Bundle and Bundle packages pair Ofqual-regulated qualifications with licensing guidance courses and live tutorial sessions, giving students everything they need to get licensed in one purchase.

The licensing guidance courses are a standalone product line. Each one is specific to a type of dog business (home boarding, day care, kennels, breeding) and provides a structured walkthrough of the relevant DEFRA statutory guidance, including flashcards, quizzes, and knowledge checks. These are built on the same ACF and Divi Machine infrastructure as the main course pages.

WooCommerce Product Bundles handles the bundling logic, and Klarna integration through Stripe gives students the option to spread the cost. Course access through Moodle begins immediately regardless of payment plan, which was a deliberate decision to remove friction from the enrolment process.

Working Relationship

I've been involved with Dog Business School for over eight years. In that time it's gone from a small WordPress site to a full training platform with WooCommerce, Moodle integration, a comprehensive content strategy, and a sister site with its own product line.

The working relationship with Randle is the model for how I prefer to work. I'm not brought in for a single project and then disappear. I'm embedded in the business. I understand how it operates, what its competitors are doing, where the regulatory landscape is shifting, and what the students need. When something breaks at 9pm on a Friday, I'm the person who picks up the phone. When there's a strategic decision about whether to build a new product line or invest in a different marketing channel, I'm in the room.

That's what long-term technical partnership looks like in practice, and it's the kind of relationship I aim to build with every client.