Two jobs that pull against each other
Hockey for Hope is a co-ed charity tournament held every September at the Greenfoot Energy Centre in Bedford, Nova Scotia. It is run by a volunteer group, Shay's Angels, and raises money through the QEII Foundation for grants that cover mental health care for cancer patients and survivors at the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. Founder Shay Needham started it in 2023.
The site has two jobs, and they pull in opposite directions. For part of the year it has to sell team spots: dates, entry, rules, how to register. Once the field is full, that pitch becomes noise, and the only useful thing the site can ask of a visitor is a donation. A site that tries to do both at once does neither well, so this one says which season it is in at the top of every page.
Seven public pages and a dashboard for the organizers
The public side is seven pages: home, tournament details, schedule and scores, rules, impact, gallery and registration. The rules page is the full 2026 rulebook transcribed from the organizers' PDF, so players can read it on a phone at the rink instead of opening an attachment. The tournament page carries the questions captains actually ask, marked up as an FAQ so search engines can read them too.
Behind it sits a password-protected dashboard where the organizers manage seasons, divisions, teams, games and scores. Pressing save publishes the change straight to the live site with no redeploy and no file to upload. If two volunteers edit at the same moment, the second save is refused with a message rather than quietly overwriting the first, which matters when scores are coming in from three rinks at once. If the live data ever fails to load, every page falls back to a copy bundled with the site, so the schedule never goes blank. That dashboard is the part of the job that belongs under portals and web apps rather than a plain website.
Smaller pieces do a lot of the work. The short address hockeyforhope.ca/donate forwards to the QEII Foundation's own fundraising page, which issues the tax receipt, so the site never handles money. Registration composes an email to the organizers instead of collecting payment details. The dashboard pages are kept out of search results with a server header, not just a line in robots.txt.
What changed, and what the website did not do
The honest version first. The money was raised by the tournament: the players, the captains, the sponsors and the people who donated. The website did not raise it. According to the figures the organizers publish on hockeyforhope.ca/impact, the tournament has raised more than 108,000 dollars since 2023 and funded more than 100 patients, and all of it was raised in the three tournaments before this site existed.
The field grew from 10 teams in 2023 to 16 in 2024 and 24 in 2025, when it sold out. The 2026 tournament was capped at 22 teams, and all 22 spots were filled. The site's narrower job was to hold that field together and keep the donation route open, and it went live on 8 September 2026, three days before the puck dropped on 11 September.
On the technical side, the desktop numbers in the strip above were measured with Lighthouse on 16 September 2026, after the tournament weekend: 99 for performance, 98 for accessibility, 100 for SEO, and the largest element on screen painted in 0.8 seconds.
What we would do differently next season
- Launch before registration opens. By the time the domain went live, every one of the 22 teams was already in the schedule. The registration half of the site did very little in 2026, and a spring launch would let it do its whole job.
- Count from day one. There was no analytics on the site over tournament weekend, so we cannot tell you how many people checked the schedule between games or followed the donate link. A cookieless counter would have answered both without a consent banner.
- Finish the password reset before launch. Reset by email was left switched off until a sending domain was verified. It worked out, but organizers should never need to call their web person to get back into their own dashboard.
- Speed on phones. Desktop is where we want it. The phone run is lower, mostly down to the hero photo, so it is not in the strip above. That is the next thing we fix, using the same approach as our site optimization work.
See it live
The site is at hockeyforhope.ca, with a credit back to the studio in the footer. If you run a tournament, a league or a fundraiser in Bedford or anywhere around the city, the Halifax web design page covers how we work with organizations here, and we are glad to talk through what your event needs before anyone commits to anything.
Sources: Lighthouse runs dated 2026-09-16; tournament figures as published by the organizers on hockeyforhope.ca. We have asked the organizers for their own numbers on registration and donations, and will add them here when they share them.