Look at a running kennel before you create your own

MushMate only shows its value once your data is in: dogs, a goal, a few runs. On day one you see empty screens and a season form. That is the worst way to discover a planning tool. The “Explore the demo” button fixes it: one click, and you are inside a kennel that is running.

What you see

The demonstration kennel is a long-distance kennel in Savoie, with about twenty dogs, a season under way towards a 450 km race, a session planned for today, care items to handle, dogs due for a body-condition note, GPS runs with their tracks, and times on the kennel's own loops. Everything the dashboard, Pack, Plan, Traces and Stats show for a real kennel, they show here. Dates are relative to the day you look: the demo does not age.

The button sits on the home page, next to “Get started”, and below the sign-in form. No account to create, no password to remember.

What the demo does not do

The demo is read-only, and it says so on every screen: a banner at the top reminds you that the kennel is fictional and that nothing is saved. If you press “Save” somewhere, the database refuses, quietly. That is not a defect: the kennel is shared by every visitor, and one visitor must not be able to change its season for the next.

The demo also will not let you change the e-mail or password of the account it uses. Both actions exist for a real account; on the demo they answer “shared account, credentials cannot be changed”.

It is not a sandbox: you cannot add your own dog to “try it out”. For that you need your own kennel — which is exactly what the banner's button offers.

Two decisions, and why

The demo is a secondary door, not the main one. On the home page, “Get started” keeps its colour; the demo sits beside it as an outline. We want you to create your kennel, not to watch ours. The demo is there to remove a doubt, not to replace the trial.

There is no public address that opens the demo. The button sends a request to the server, which opens the session itself. A shareable link would have been handier, but it could also have been placed anywhere and indexed by anything. A button on our own site is enough.

When you are done

The banner carries a “Create my kennel” button. It signs you out of the demo and brings you to the sign-up form, already open on the right tab. Your thirty-day trial starts there.