Hi Azz
When i mentioned the rescues being too busy to update the info i did mean also emailing as well.
As copying and pasting all the photos and write ups onto an email would end up being the same as copying and pasting it all onto the forum.
My old rescue used to have one volunteer whom updated our website dog section onto two rescue forums.
What she did was right click on each picture, copy and paste onto a word document, then copy and paste that dog's text.
She did this for every dog.
Then she proof read and fixed any formatting issues and then copied the whole document onto the forum.
Have you considered the code idea?
Dogsblog make a code available meaning any rescue posting on dogblog would have their entries automatically edited on dogsblog everytime their was a change on their own website.
Your website is a great idea, but you will need to overcome the issues that have come up in the past on other sites.
Other than the problem of the rescues having lack of manpower to do this stuff, we also had visitors to the rescue come to see dogs that had been rehomed months earlier, then they would be rude to our staff members as they were convinced the site they were looking at was ours.
We even had websites copying and posting our dogs without our knowledge - breed sites tended to do this.
Another problem that put us off was the politics you got on some forums.
For example, the main rescue dog forum in the UK has banned various rescues from his site.
For one example, one was banned because it had one of those automatic google ads that happened to flash up an ad about ecollars.
He even went as far as anytime someone typed in this rescue's name on his site, a message came up saying something along the lines of 'banned, as supports ecollars'!
Some of his old moderators split away and started an alternative rescue forum.
After which one of his remaining moderators visted a cetain rescue centre, then started a thread about poor standards at the rescue. Said rescue was visited by Dogs Trust and RSPCA and they didnt agree with the conclusions.
The breakaway forum owners visited said rescue and also didnt agree, so they decided to allow said rescue to remain on their site.
Then both forums had war on each other.
The owner of the first forum went round emailing every single rescue that posted their dogs up for rehoming on both sites, telling them that by posting on the breakaway they were endorsing the animal cruelty and neglect of the rescue centre they had banned but the breakaway had allowed to remain, so if they wish to remain on his site they should quit the breakaway site.
He emailed our volunteer whom posted up our dogs on both sites.
We told her just to say thank you for his concerns, we arent interested in getting involved in all of this, we are just happy to post up our dogs in various places to increase rehoming. However, we had a very big site of our own that could cope just as well without any outside forum if needs be, so if he wished to remove us, so be it.
Funny enough, he never did.
However, myself and my colleagues in our dog rehoming team decided to remove ourselves from all external sites anyway, we figured it just wasnt worth all this hassle and bull**** people were imposing upon us, especially as the vast majority of people that contacted us had found us directly thru google or word of mouth, and very few people mentioned finding us thru any external websites/forums.
For the 'big nationals' like like Battersea, Wood green, RSPCA, Blue Cross, etc, this is even more the case - as far as I am aware they have never ever used any websites outside their own all the years the internet has been around.
None of which is your fault of course Azz, but if you do find that you struggle to gain interest from the rescues, at least you can understand the reasons why.
A good starting point to appeal to man of them en bloc would be via the ADCH:
http://www.adch.org.uk/adch-members-list.html
Good luck.