Team Bully Buster

Keta and I crossed paths through jiu-jitsu — we both trained at 10th Planet HQ under Eddie Bravo. By the time she was ready to put a real website behind Team Bully Buster in late 2018, the conversation didn't have to start with introductions; we already shared a community and a vocabulary.

What she needed was straightforward: TBB had a brand, a mission, programs, instructors, photography, and copy — and no web presence. The brief was to take all of that and give it an official home. A real website. Built to last past the first season.

The mission underneath the brief is the part that mattered. TBB exists to teach women and children to defend themselves and stand up for themselves — to walk into schools, communities, and conversations as people who can't be pushed around. The site couldn't be the kind of half-built nonprofit page that signals an underfunded org. It had to read like the organization Keta is actually building.

I argued for the same approach I take with my long-term clients: hand-coded static HTML with light JavaScript. Built once, hosted simply, edited by hand whenever something needed to change.

For a small nonprofit, this is a more respectful arrangement than it sounds. Templated platforms — Wix, Squarespace, WordPress — solve for "the founder edits the site themselves." That sounds like a feature until you watch a mission-driven founder spend an evening fighting a CMS instead of doing the actual work. Keta's evenings are better spent training kids, going to schools, and running the org than learning a backend interface.

A static site I host and maintain means Keta sends me what's changed — a new instructor, a new press hit, an updated schedule, a new photo from an event — and I update it. The website never costs her time. The trust required for that arrangement is the same trust we already had from the gym.

A site that respects the brand it inherited

Keta brought the logo, the colors, and the voice. My job was to give them a home, not to redesign them. The site lives inside her existing brand — the mark sits in the header where it should, the colors carry through with discipline, and the typography supports the brand instead of competing with it. The whole design vocabulary of the page is in service of the mission, not announcing the designer.

Programs treated as the entry point

When a parent lands on a martial arts and self-defense site, they're not there for the brand story. They're there to figure out what their kid would actually do at TBB. The home page leads with a clean grid of program tiles — Muay Thai, no-gi jiu-jitsu, wrestling, boxing, fitness — that reads at a glance and routes the visitor straight to the program that matches their kid. Every other section of the site supports that primary path: instructor bios build trust in the people teaching the programs, the gallery shows what the classes actually look like, the press section establishes credibility, the schedule answers "when can my kid go." The page is structured around the question a parent is actually asking.

Copy and photography lived in the founder's hands

I wrote zero copy on this site. Keta brought every word. That's correct: TBB's voice is hers — the language of someone who has been a martial artist, an actress, and a pro-wrestler, and has lived inside the mission. The site frames her words; it doesn't replace them. The same goes for photography. Keta supplied the images, I placed them, and the design pulled back so her photography could carry its own weight.

That division of labor is part of why the site has aged well. The design layer is doing infrastructure work; the founder layer is doing voice work. Both stay in their lane.

The site is hand-coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no build pipeline, no framework, no CMS. Every update is a code edit. That sounds austere; in practice, it's the simplest thing in the relationship.

I host the site on my own infrastructure — same arrangement I take with most of my long-term clients. Keta doesn't manage a hosting account, doesn't track SSL renewal, doesn't get registrar emails about expiring domains. The infrastructure layer is invisible from her side. When something needs to change on the site, she texts me. When something needs to be renewed in the background, I handle it.

The architecture covers everything a small nonprofit's site has to: home, about, instructor bios for Coach Keta and Coach Kru, programs, memberships, schedule, gallery, press, contact. Mobile-responsive throughout. Built to load fast on the kind of older devices a school computer lab or a parent's older phone might serve it on, because that's the audience.

The site has been TBB's official home since January 2019. Six years. Keta has not had to think about the website in that time — she's been the founder of a working organization, not the manager of a CMS. Programs have been added, bios have evolved, press hits have been posted, gallery photos have rotated through, and the site has held up.

The "Website by: Eric Bell Designs" credit is in the footer where it has been since launch. The site has done its job quietly. Across the engagement, more than 40% of visitors have arrived through organic search — the kind of traffic that means people are finding TBB through Google when they're looking for help, not just clicking through from social. Visitors arriving from referral traffic — press hits, partner organizations — spend more than three minutes on the site on average, the kind of dwell time that signals the page actually delivers when it has to.

A redesign is on the horizon now — six years is the right time for a refresh, especially as TBB has grown — and it will be the same arrangement: I'll handle the design and the build, Keta will handle the voice, and the next iteration will be the home for the next chapter.

That's the result for a 2019 nonprofit build: still standing, still credited, still the right home for what comes next.

The redesign is what comes next, and the architecture is the question worth thinking through ahead of it. The original site was built around a parent landing on the home page and routing into a program. Six years in, TBB does more — school visits, celebrity and athlete interviews about bullying, partnerships, events, advocacy. The next site has room to make those things first-class citizens of the architecture, not bolted on. That's the conversation Keta and I will have when the redesign starts in earnest.