SBG History

Snowboarder Guide was founded in the fall of 1998 as an online resort review site. Chris Rogers, and two of his lifelong friends, set out in a small motorhome to shred as many resorts as possible. Early in the planning process they discovered that there weren’t any guides to help a rider decide where to ride. Snowboarderguide.com was soon live and reporting on resorts around the US.

1998 – 2001 | SBG’s first look, although the colors changed a few times. At the time of the original road trip, SBG was focused on resort reviews, there wasn’t a product review area. We were the only online resort review website we knew of. The web was still gaining momentum in 1998, and SBG’s first site was hand-coded. The road-trip pre-dated internet cafe’s by a few years, so access and updates to the site were infrequent. We had one laptop between the three of us (and no cell phones), and access to the web was with a dial-up account based in Alaska.

2001 – 2003 | Starting in 2001 Snowboarder Guide expanded to include product reviews and industry news. It was also the first year SBG started attending events as media. The sport was rapidly growing at this point, and SBG rode the avalanche of consumer demand for information about snowboard products. The original SBG crew had moved on, so we began forming a review team to disperse the reviews among more writers.

This design went through several minor changes during it’s run, including a photo gallery, and a weekly photo that cycled on the front page, but this was the basic look. Still hand-coded at this point, requiring html updates for every page.

2003 – 2005 | Site traffic and comments from readers during the 2002-2003 told us there was much more interest in snowboard gear reviews than in resort reviews, and while we continued to review resorts, the priority really shifted towards products. We were receiving more products for review than we could handle, and our team increased to seven reviewers out testing gear. During this period we also started receiving our first requests for product testing and R&D in addition to reviews.

As SBG grew, we were really feeling the constraints of a static website, but there weren’t any decent review scripts at the time. The site was instead redesigned using a highly modified version of a news/blog writing software called e-xoops; finally a database driven backend.

2005 – 2009 | In the fall of 2004 the editorial staff relocated to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. During a previous review trip to Steamboat, Chris’ review included “Of all the resorts we’ve reviewed, it was the first mountain that I felt I could live at.” The site continued to grow, and over the 2004-2005 season SBG received more than 1 million visitors. This traffic more than doubled over the next year and the 2005-2006 season saw more than 2.5 million visitors.

The previous database software had served us well, but still didn’t have all the features we wanted. This re-design was introduced in November of 2005, migrated articles, news, blogs, and other posts to WordPress, and moved reviews to the Censura review system. There were minor layout changes during this design, mostly moving graphics around and highlighting “featured” products on the front page.

2009 – Present | The first major redesign since 2005, the 2009 site featured bold black and blue colors and really highlighted the news, articles, blogs, and story sections. The review engine was also opened up to accept user reviews. Still using WordPress and Censura.