Rebuilding a Dog Rescue Website from Scratch: Scraping, Crawling, and Modernizing Yankee Chihuahua Rescue
A legacy static HTML website for a New England chihuahua rescue organization gets rebuilt as a modern Next.js app — but first, we had to scrape every page, crawl every image, and fix every hallucinated paragraph. What started as a simple redesign turned into a multi-session adventure of web crawling, content accuracy battles, and seasonal theming.
yankeechihuahuarescue.vercel.appNext.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSLucide ReactCSS AnimationsWeb ScrapingVercel1mo ago
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How it was built
7 stages1
Content Discovery & Scraping
The project began by fetching the old Yankee Chihuahua Rescue static HTML site to extract its content. Web fetch tools were used to pull text from every page — home, about, adoption, surrender, volunteer, chihuahua info articles, happy endings, events, and donation pages. Links were cataloged, and a content inventory was built to understand the full scope of the site. The Next.js project was initialized with Tailwind CSS and the App Router structure was planned out with tasks for each major section.
~90 messages2
Full Site Rebuild
All major pages were built out: Home with hero section, About YCRAA, Chihuahua Info (with 13 sub-articles like breed standards, crate training, chocolate poisoning, famous chihuahuas), Volunteer, Adoption, Surrender, Happy Endings, Events, and Donate. Navigation and footer components were created as shared layout elements. The site structure closely mirrored the original but with modern responsive layouts, proper semantic HTML, and consistent visual design.
~120 messages3
Content Accuracy Overhaul
After discovering that the AI had rewritten much of the original website's text, a manual content correction process began. The user pasted the actual text from each page of the old site one by one, and each page was updated to use the authentic content. The approach shifted from 'modernize everything' to 'modernize the look, preserve the words.' Every page was cross-referenced against the original to ensure the rescue organization's voice and information remained intact.
~100 messages4
Image Crawling & Integration
A custom web crawler was built to systematically visit every page of the old site and download all images. The crawler walked the site's link structure, found image URLs in img tags, and saved them locally. Multiple rounds of crawling were needed — the first pass missed images embedded in unusual paths, CSS backgrounds, and sub-pages. Images were organized in a scraped images directory and integrated into the corresponding pages of the new site. The PayPal donate button image was discovered missing only after manual review.
~170 messages5
Text Crawling & Page Completion
After the image crawler proved useful, a similar approach was applied to text: the crawler was modified to extract the text content from every page of the old site. This text was then used to fill in remaining pages that were still missing content or had placeholder text. The crawler walked every endpoint, captured the readable content, and the new pages were rebuilt to incorporate both the freshly crawled text and the previously downloaded images, creating complete page representations.
~100 messages6
St. Patrick's Day Theme
A seasonal St. Patrick's Day theme was requested, initially as a toggle. The first implementation was minimal — just a banner and color toggle — and was rejected by the user as insufficient. A complete redesign followed: all emojis across the site were replaced with Lucide React icons, the color palette was reworked to Irish greens and golds, and falling animated leaves were added to the hero section background using CSS animations. The toggle was later removed in favor of making the St. Patrick's theme the permanent default.
~170 messages7
Visual Polish & Layout Fixes
The final phase focused on tightening layouts and fixing visual bugs across all pages. Floating image layouts were converted to flexbox for more predictable behavior. Spacing was compacted — the surrender page and others had excessive whitespace in headers. The iGive messaging was corrected from being labeled as a donation service to its actual purpose as a shop-and-donate affiliate program. Container rendering glitches were debugged — a brief visual flash appeared on the main page hero when navigating back via the navbar logo. Form submissions for adoption applications were investigated and referenced from the original site.
~130 messagesComments
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Builder of firstcommit.io. I ship with AI and share the journey.
0 followers5 karmaJoined Feb 2026
Build This
7 stages to follow
Paste this in your AI coding tool to build your own version, guided by the approach in this guide.
Build the project from this First Commit guide: b6ec0d26-6f40-400c-82cf-10f264f9b24aNo source repo linked — follow the guide stages to build from scratch.
Requires First Commit MCP connected
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