Non-profit Canine Site contains wealth of information

www.dogpatch.org is a non-profit organization catering to the canine public. It is a fabulous resource with links to rescue organizations, trainers, dog clubs, dog fanciers, and all dog lovers. They are a dot org not a dot com and they are also non-profit. It deserves a visit by any dog owner.

With so many websites trying to make money only for profit it is refreshing to find one that is non-profit.

www.dogpatch.org is a tremendous resource and is mainly an informational site. Any revenue is used for the cost of running the site. www.dogpatch.org was founded by Mary Jo Sminkey of Virginia and was started simply as a personal site with a few pages about her dogs Then she started collecting information and materials about dog training and showing and the site gradually expanded to what it is today. Mary Jo spent close to 10 years of her life building the site. That has led to problems with maintaining the site...it's one thing to put stuff up on a website and another to keep it up-to-date and accurate! So some parts of the site are now hosted at other places, and over the years Mary Jo has had various people to help maintain the rest of it. www.dogpatch.org gets quite a few visitors with weekly traffic of 22,000 unique visitors and some 100,000 hits. That's quite an accomplishment for what was once a personal site.

Recently Mary Jo decided that she was no longer able to maintain the site properly due to other responsibilities so the site has been sold to Gordon Thomas of Newfoundland, Canada. Mary Jo's hope is that it will be a source of information for many years to come and with Mr. Thomas' assistance Mary Jo's hope will come true. It was a hard decision for Mary Jo to make, as it had been a big part of Mary Jo's life for many years, and she learned many of the skills that she now earns her living with while working on it. Mary Jo felt kind of like a mother giving up a child for adoption!

To sum up www.dogpatch.com is well worth a visit by any dog lover and you surely will learn something about your canine friend.