Skateland West has been on Loop 410 since 1985, run by two generations of one family. Their old site was a WordPress install that barely worked on a phone, and updating it meant calling someone who knew the workarounds. I built them a custom site they own and update themselves, designed with the people who actually run the place, and I host and look after it.
Visit the live site → The old site was a WordPress install on Turbify, layered with plugins and a page builder nobody on staff knew how to use. It loaded slowly on a phone and didn't show the event schedule correctly, which for a rink is the one page that matters. The newsletter went out from a personal Gmail account, addressed from a spreadsheet. Bookings ran through a third-party provider the staff already knew, and that part worked, so I left it alone.
The rink itself runs fine. The software around it had been slowly getting in the way of the business for years.
I designed the site with the family who run the rink day to day, and kept their own wording wherever it was still true. I set up an editor so the person announcing cosmic skate night can post it in a couple of minutes, and built the event schedule for a parent checking it on their phone at 10pm on a Sunday. Newsletter sign-ups now land straight in a Google Sheet, with spam protection on the form.
The look comes from 80s rink signage: neon, a little scuffed, and not ironic. The rink looks like that because it is that.
Next.js on the front end, with Payload CMS and Postgres behind it, running on a server I manage with nightly off-site backups. Bookings stay with the provider the staff already knows. I offered to build a custom booking flow, but it wasn't worth adding another login for the team. If they ever want to bring bookings in-house, the offer stands.
I still host and maintain the site. When the card processor's security vendor flagged it in August, I disputed the false alarm the same day and changed the server so it won't come back. The family got one email from me explaining it in plain English. The decisions behind the rebuild are written up in the journal.