Skateland West has been on Loop 410 since 1985 — three generations of one family, three dollars to skate on a Tuesday. They were paying $500/year for a WordPress blog that barely worked on a phone. We built them a custom site they own, on hosting they can afford, designed with the people who actually run the place.
The old site was a $500/year WordPress install that took four seconds to load on a phone and didn't show the event schedule correctly. The owners were paying a separate $90/mo for a newsletter tool that nobody on staff knew how to use, and the "book a birthday party" flow was a contact form that went to an email address no one checked after 6pm.
The rink itself runs fine. The software around it had been slowly getting in the way of the business for years.
We co-designed with three generations of the family — grandfather who opened it, daughter who runs it, grandson who manages Friday nights. Six weeks, one flat fee. Custom CMS so the person posting about cosmic skate night can actually post. Self-hosted newsletter so the $90/mo goes away. A booking flow written for parents on their phones at 10pm on a Sunday.
The visual direction pulls from 80s rink signage — neon, a little scuffed, not ironic. The rink looks like that because it is that.
SvelteKit on the front. Payload CMS with Postgres on a $12/mo Hetzner VPS. Listmonk for newsletters, self-hosted. A small admin tool for the booking flow that writes to a Google Calendar the team already uses — no new software to learn.
Total infra cost: $85/year. Down from $500 on WordPress + $1,080/yr on Mailchimp. The savings cover the admin tool's ongoing hosting twelve times over.
Launching publicly in May for the 41st season. Retainer'd for the next year to tune the booking flow, add a kids'-leagues schedule, and get paid search running for birthdays — the thing the rink makes most of its money on.
Full technical writeup on the journal.