Western Edition Skateboards

“We have worked with many web designers before and Chris was the fastest and easiest to work with. He did a great job creating a clean, easy-to-maintain site in a timely fashion.”—Ian Johnson, Art Director

• westernedition.tv
• XHTML, PHP, MySQL, CSS
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Valid CSS3
• Custom PHP / MySQL GUI
• Browser caching
• 100/100 performance score on Pingdom
• Completion Time: 40 Hours

Western Edition is an internationally-distributed skateboard company based in San Francisco, California. They developed their first site during the Flash craze. Maintenance difficulties and compatibility concerns eventually led them to contact me for a redesign. Their objectives included a newsfeed, teamrider pages, catalog pages, a video portal, distribution info and basic company details. They were looking for a clean, uncluttered layout that was easy to update, fit the company aesthetic and displayed decently across devices. Here’s the homepage:

They also wanted pages for teamriders, video and catalogs:

Perhaps most importantly, they wanted the new site to facilitate easy updates by people with no knowledge of HTML. I coded a PHP / MySQL backend to drive a simple newsfeed for the homepage along with a clean, minimalist interface:

I recently checked the site using Pingdom’s performance tools:

Lastly, the site passes W3C standards for markup and CSS:

If I were to improve the site today, I would use a responsive layout, DRY the markup, refactor the style sheet and reorganize the directory structure to match my current coding style. I would also argue for bigger text in the newsfeed. That said, the client remains happy to this day and I still get an occasional compliment on the site despite it being two years old. This one was win-win for everybody.