Nature's Earth Products | Faster, Safer Custom Website with Online Job Applications

A complete rebuild of the website for Nature's Earth Products, an Alabama company that has made horse bedding and wood heating pellets since 1992. I replaced their old WordPress site with a custom-built one that's faster and much harder to hack - without making them switch web hosts.

There's nothing on the site for hackers to break into: no WordPress login, no plugins to keep patched and no database. The only moving parts are the contact form and the job application, and both are locked down against spam and misuse.

The biggest addition is an online job application. Applicants fill it out on the site, check it over, save a PDF copy and send it in with their resume. The company's hiring team gets the application and resume by email, and the applicant gets a confirmation.

Relaunched November 2, 2026.

Nature's Earth Products has made pine pellet horse bedding and wood heating pellets since 1992, manufacturing in Reform, Alabama with a head office in Florida. Its products - Equine Pine pellet bedding, Equine Pine Shavings, kiln-dried wood pellet crumble and Freedom Fuel premium heating pellets - serve horse owners, homeowners and industrial buyers, and the company also offers private-label manufacturing.

The website has a long history with CMR. It started on WordPress, and I redesigned it early on; a later redesign by another company gave it its current look. When that company could no longer be reached, Nature's Earth came back to CMR. I rebuilt that design from the ground up on a modern stack and added the job application system, so the brand stayed familiar to customers while everything underneath changed.

Like most WordPress sites, the old one needed constant updates to stay safe, and every plugin added another way in for hackers. The new site is custom-built and published as simple, ready-made pages, so there's no login page to attack, no plugins to keep patched and no database to break into. It runs on the same web host the company has worked with for years, so nothing changed on their end. Leftover links from the WordPress days are cleanly retired so they don't linger in Google.

The site's only behind-the-scenes code powers the contact form and the job application. Both make sure submissions come from the real site, quietly catch spam bots, limit how often one visitor can submit, and check every field before anything is sent. Uploaded resumes are inspected to confirm they're genuine PDF or Word files, not just files with the right name. Passwords and email settings are kept out of public reach, every page uses a secure connection, and updates are published through a controlled, step-by-step process.

Hiring was the biggest new feature. Each job opening has an Apply Online button that opens the full application. Applicants fill it in, review it, can save a PDF copy for their records, and send it with a resume in PDF or Word format. The hiring team receives the finished application and resume by email, and the applicant gets a confirmation. People who prefer paper can still download a printable application, and each job listing is set up so it can appear in Google's job search.

The company also owned separate web addresses for its Equine Pine and Freedom Fuel products. All five now send visitors - and the search history those addresses built up - straight to the matching product page on the main site. Every page is set up to be found and understood by Google and AI search tools: clear titles and descriptions, well-organized headings, and behind-the-scenes details about the company, both locations, its products, common questions and job openings. Google and Bing were connected at launch, and pages and images are tuned to load quickly. The site is covered by Annual Website Care, which includes monitoring, security updates and small changes such as new job postings.