Skateboards.com
Building Skateboarding’s Global Home Base
Skateboarding has always had a strong sense of place: a local park, a neighborhood shop, a regular crew. But finding those things, especially in an unfamiliar city or country, has always meant piecing together outdated directories, Google searches, and word of mouth. Skateboards.com set out to fix that.
The brand came to us with a well-known domain and a clear ambition: transform a poorly performing dropship store into the definitive global hub for skateboarding culture. That meant starting from scratch, not patching what existed. Over six to seven months, we built a full-featured community platform, handling all development, content writing, SEO, and paid advertising. Kelly Dee Williams and his team at Superbase brought the visual identity to life with a bold brand and design system that gives the platform its immediate energy and staying power. The site launched February 1, 2025, and picked up a 2025 Silver Rocky from the Boise Ad Federation shortly after.
Before our remodel.
After.
At a Glance
Industry: Consumer / Skateboarding Culture
Services: Development, Content Writing, SEO, Paid Advertising
Platform: Laravel, WordPress
Compliance: WCAG 2.2 AA
Design: Superbase
Timeline: 6-7 months, launched February 2025
The Challenge
A dropship e-commerce site with minimal community features, no locator tools, and no content infrastructure
The Approach
Full ground-up rebuild on Laravel with a WordPress CMS layer, global map-based locator tools, AI-driven event aggregation, and an ongoing content program
The Outcome
A globally scalable platform with high-90s PageSpeed scores, WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, and a 2025 Silver Rocky from the Boise Ad Federation
The Situation
The previous Skateboards.com was a dropship store: product listings, a checkout flow, no real community, no tools, no reason for a skater to return. The domain had real potential: a clean, memorable URL in a space with no dominant digital platform BUT the site wasn’t doing anything with it.
The goal was to become the place skaters actually go. Not to buy a deck from a warehouse, but to find a park in a new city, locate a local shop, see what events are coming up, and connect with other people who skate. That kind of platform requires a completely different architecture, a different content strategy, and a different design language than a retail site. Nothing from the old build was worth keeping.
We started over.
What We Built
A Ground-Up Rebuild on Laravel and WordPress
The technical foundation needed to support a globally scalable, data-driven platform while remaining manageable for ongoing content production. We built the core application on the Laravel framework, which gave us the flexibility to build custom tools: the locator maps, the event aggregation system, the filtering logic – without being constrained by off-the-shelf solutions.
For content management, we layered in WordPress as the backend CMS. That keeps blog posts, trick guides, and forum moderation straightforward for the team managing it day to day, without exposing the underlying Laravel architecture to content editors.
A Global Skate Park and Shop Locator
The park locator is the centerpiece of the platform. It pulls data from Google Places, additional structured sources, and direct community submissions to build an international, searchable map of skateparks. Users can filter by park type and attributes, view detailed park pages, and share locations across social platforms.
The global skate park locator, powered by aggregated data and community submissions.
The skate shop directory works the same way: map-based discovery, filterable, shareable, built to surface local shops anywhere in the world.
The international skate shop finder.
An AI-Driven Event Calendar Covering 200 U.S. Cities
Keeping an event calendar current at scale is a maintenance burden most platforms can’t sustain. We built an AI-assisted aggregation system that pulls upcoming skate-related events from the 200 largest U.S. metros using structured rules and automation. The result is a calendar that stays populated without requiring manual data entry for every listing.
The automated event calendar, covering major metros across the U.S.
Blog, Video Content, and Community Forum
We produce two skateboarding topic blog posts per month for the site, covering trick guides (with video), skater spotlights, and culture coverage. The content is written to serve both the reader and search: informational, specific, and built around the terms skaters actually use.
The blog, updated twice monthly with instructional and cultural content.
The community forum gives skaters a space for peer discussion independent of the locator tools and editorial content. It keeps the platform from functioning as a one-way broadcast and gives returning users a reason to stay.
The community forum for peer discussion and engagement.
Mobile-First Design and WCAG 2.2 AA Compliance
Skaters use their phones. The platform was designed and built for mobile-first usage from the start, not adapted for it after the fact. The homepage opens with a full-screen video background and oversized navigation that reads clearly on small screens in real-world conditions, without sacrificing the visual impact Superbase built into the brand.
The mobile experience, designed for skaters in the field.
Full WCAG 2.2 AA compliance was built in throughout, not bolted on at the end. PageSpeed scores land in the high 90s, and the site performs consistently across devices and markets.
Results
The platform launched February 1, 2025, and has grown to approximately over 22,000 unique visitors per month in its first year. High-90s PageSpeed scores across the board confirm the performance architecture is holding at scale. WCAG 2.2 AA compliance is maintained sitewide.
The most concrete external validation came in spring 2026, when Skateboards.com received a Silver Rocky from the Boise Ad Federation: a regional award recognizing outstanding digital work. For a platform about a year old going up against established entries, that recognition reflects the quality of what Superbase and White Whale built together.
The ongoing content and SEO program continues to build organic reach month over month, and the event aggregation system keeps the platform current without adding manual overhead. The foundation is in place for the platform to grow as the community does.