The Bus Stops Here Foundation: four years, three websites, and talking them out of one I built

The short version

I have been the foundation’s web guy since the summer of 2022. In that time I rebuilt their site once, built their golf tournament a site of its own, ran both for four years, and then told them the tournament site should be deleted.

That last part is the interesting one, so it is worth explaining how we got there.

The migration

Beth Vietmeier runs Valiant 3, and she also runs Jerome Bettis’s foundation. I met her through Matt Blocki in the summer of 2022, doing unrelated work for a wealth management firm. Within a month she had handed me two websites.

Both were built in Webflow by a developer who was no longer involved. That is a specific kind of stuck. The sites worked, but nobody at either organization could meaningfully change them, and the person who could was gone. So the first job was not a redesign at all. It was getting them onto something the people who actually work there could run.

I rebuilt both in WordPress in July 2022, keeping the existing design rather than relitigating it, and started the care plan the same month. I did not bill for the rebuild. It was the price of getting the relationship onto solid ground, and four years of retainer says that was the right trade.

The Blue and Gold Classic

In October 2022 Beth sent a short email: what would it cost to build a website for Jerome Bettis’s Blue and Gold Celebrity Golf Classic?

The event is the foundation’s signature fundraiser, a celebrity golf outing with Notre Dame alumni and Pittsburgh sports names. It was big enough to deserve its own front door, so I built it one, on its own domain, and it went live before the end of the year.

It was a good site and I was proud of it. It ran through four event cycles. Every autumn we would refresh it for the coming year, roll the sponsors, update the date. That rhythm is most of what a maintained website actually is, and it is the part nobody puts in a case study.

The consolidation

Four years later the event had matured. It sells out on repeat sponsors and referrals now, with no marketing required. And the site I had built for it had quietly become a problem.

Donations were already going where they should, to the foundation. The problem was everything around that: one organization split across two brands, two hosting bills, and two sites to keep current, when the event no longer needed one of its own. Beth had already noticed the pattern. She had the diagnosis and needed someone to say the obvious thing out loud, which was that the site I built should stop existing.

So that is what I said.

One site, not two. The event became a section of the foundation site. Everything a sponsor or attendee needs is there, and the donate path is the foundation’s.

Keep the domain, redirect it. This was the part worth being careful about. “Blue and Gold Classic” ranks, and years of links point at that domain. Killing it outright would have thrown that away. The domain stays registered and every URL on it now redirects into the new event page, so the search equity and anyone’s old bookmarks land where they should. The hosting is gone. Only the redirect remains.

Fix the bugs first, quietly. By 2026 my own 2022 build had gone stale in ways that are easy to miss from the inside. A retired campaign was still running as the homepage banner, so an active organization read as one that had stopped doing things. Programs were not rendering. The newsletter signup returned an error to anyone who tried it. And on a phone, the donate button was missing entirely, which is the single worst place for a nonprofit to have a bug. None of that was interesting work and none of it was in scope. All of it got fixed before we talked about design.

Cut what had ended. Retired campaigns came off. What is left is what they are actually doing now, which turned out to be the fastest way to make the site feel current.

The part I got wrong, and the part I held

The restraint was harder than the build. It would have been easy to sell sponsor management, per-year galleries, a full event platform. But the event does not have a marketing problem. Building it a marketing system would have been spending donor money on something that solves nothing. Basic event info, the sponsorship PDF they already had, and photos. That is it.

What I did miss was the numbers. I put stats on the site that I had inferred rather than asked for, including Jerome’s career rushing yards, which reads as a football résumé rather than the foundation’s impact. Frankie Grenick caught it and sent me the figures the foundation actually publishes: more than 10,000 youth served, more than 100 community partners. Those are the numbers on the site now. I should have asked first.

Where it landed

One site. One hosting bill. A donate button that works on a phone. A newsletter form that does not error. The Blue and Gold Classic still owns its search results, but every one of those searches now arrives at the foundation.

Two of the three sites in this story are gone, and I built both of them. That is not a failure of the earlier work. It is what it looks like when someone sticks around long enough to see what a business actually needs, instead of shipping the thing that was asked for and moving on.