Case study · Custom site + CMS
The booster club that owns its own site.
A custom static site and lightweight CMS replacing a hosted booster-club platform, for McKinney Boyd High School Theatre — Troupe 7052, in McKinney, TX.
A custom static site and lightweight CMS replacing a hosted booster-club platform, for McKinney Boyd High School Theatre — Troupe 7052, in McKinney, TX.
The booster club's web presence lived on BoosterHub, a hosted platform shared by thousands of booster organisations. It worked — but it was a tenant in someone else's product. The club owned its content, not its site.
The rebuild is a custom static site backed by a purpose-built CMS, a Postgres database, and serverless functions. Parents can join and pay online, sponsors can commit at four levels, the season calendar and photo gallery are managed by non-technical volunteers, and every page is search-optimised under the club's own domain.
Observations from the live BoosterHub site.
| Area | BoosterHub |
|---|---|
| Domain | A subdomain and numeric path on a shared platform (…boosterhub.com/home/9334) |
| Design | Platform template; branding limited to a logo drop-in |
| Calendar | Present, but showing "No Upcoming Events" while the season was underway |
| Payments | Membership and donations routed through the platform's own flow |
| Photos | No dedicated production gallery |
| Content editing | Through the platform's admin, in its structure |
| SEO | Constrained by the platform's markup and URL scheme |
| Cost | Ongoing platform subscription |
The most telling detail is the empty calendar. The feature existed; keeping it current was friction enough that it went stale — and a stale calendar is worse than none, because visitors trust it and get nothing.
Home, Events, About, Join, Sponsors, Gallery, Contact — custom design throughout, with a full-bleed video hero, the club's navy and red, and a shared nav component.
Pay online (PayPal, Venmo, or card, no account needed), send by Venmo/PayPal/Zelle with a pre-written memo, or pay by check. All three record the signup instantly; offline routes are marked pending until the treasurer confirms.
The browser sends a level name; the server looks up the amount and re-verifies the captured total before recording. A tampered page can't invent a price. A 3% fee applies to online payments only — enforced and itemised server-side.
Each production carries multiple performance dates and showtimes. Start/end dates, the "Next Up" pick, and the ticker are derived automatically. Shows roll into Past Season on their own — the calendar can't go stale the way the old one did.
No separate admin for content. An approved editor signs in, toggles Edit, and changes text and images directly on the live page — inline editing with revision history, image replacement, and a volunteer-managed photo gallery.
At /admin: every sign-up with CSV export and a payment column (PayPal / Venmo-Zelle / Check, paid vs pending), contact messages with read state, calendar management, and gallery categories. "Total raised" counts only confirmed money.
Every page has a full SEO/AEO head — title, description, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter, and JSON-LD (PerformingGroup, TheaterEvent, OfferCatalog, ContactPage, breadcrumbs) — plus a sitemap, a robots.txt that welcomes AI answer engines, and clean URLs.
The design started desktop-only, with 474px of horizontal overflow on a phone. It now has a dedicated mobile layer — hamburger nav, collapsing grids, stacked hero buttons — verified at 390px and 320px with zero horizontal overflow.
| BoosterHub | broadwaybroncos.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Shared subdomain, numeric paths | Own domain, clean URLs |
| Design | Platform template | Custom |
| Calendar | Manual; was showing none | Multi-date, self-advancing, with archive |
| Payment methods | Platform flow | Card, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, check |
| Price integrity | Platform-managed | Server-side, verified at capture |
| Offline payments | — | Recorded as pending, tracked to confirmation |
| Photo gallery | — | Categorised, volunteer-managed |
| Content editing | Platform admin | Inline, on the live page, with revisions |
| SEO | Platform-constrained | Full metadata, structured data, sitemap |
| Mobile | Platform responsive | Purpose-built layer |
| Data ownership | On the platform | Club's own Postgres, exportable |
| Hosting cost | Subscription | Free tiers (Vercel, Supabase, Resend) |
No build step, no framework runtime — plain HTML from a CDN. Fast, cheap, and nothing to keep patched.
Content overrides, revisions, events, gallery, sign-ups, and messages. Row-level security is the access control — a browser with the public key still can't write.
Anything needing a secret — PayPal order creation and capture, manual-payment recording, contact email. Keys live in env vars, never in the browser.
Transactional email sent from the club's own verified domain.
Browser ─── static HTML + CMS/checkout JS │ ├── Supabase ── content · events · gallery · signups · messages [RLS] │ └── /api/* ──── PayPal (live) · Resend · service-role writes [secrets]
Current state: PayPal live · 8 published events · 4 gallery categories · 7 URLs in the sitemap · 3% fee active.
A few problems worth recording, because they weren't obvious.
PayPal opens its window synchronously on click, before validation runs — so rejecting an incomplete form closed the window it had just opened, and the button looked broken. Fixed by gating the buttons behind an overlay that blocks the click until the form is valid, plus a ?redirect=1 fallback to PayPal's hosted page for browsers that block popups.
The CMS numbers editable images by their position on the page. The events section renders after a database fetch, so its poster claimed an index a homepage image already owned — editing one silently changed the other. Fixed by excluding data-driven regions from tagging and adding a used-key guard.
Safari refuses to open the file picker for an input that isn't rendered, so upload buttons silently did nothing for one admin while working for another. The inputs are now rendered but visually hidden.
A mobile rule setting width:100% on inputs caught checkboxes too, turning each volunteer-interest checkbox into a long bar that shoved its label out of the row. Page-level overflow measured clean the whole time — the distortion was entirely inside the label.
The club now owns its site, its domain, its data, and the ability to change any of it without a developer. Parents can join and pay however they prefer; the season calendar keeps itself current; production photography has a home; and every page is properly indexed under the club's own name.
Running cost is the domain.
We build custom sites — React front ends, WordPress or custom CMS, payments, and the SEO to get found. Based in Plano, TX.
Start a project