Staff | History

Snowboarder Guide was founded in the fall of 1998 as an online resort review resource. Editor Chris Rogers, and two of his friends, set out in a small motorhome to ride at as many western 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.

Here is our first website, this is how the site looked from the fall of 1998 until early 2001. The one big difference is that the background colors were different.
In 2001 we expanded Snowboarder Guide to include product reviews. A site update followed shortly. 2001 was also the first year we started attending events as media.

In March of 2001 we changed the color-scheme of the website and updated the look a bit. This design went through several minor changes during it’s run, but this was the basic look.


In 2002 the product review section of the website really took off, as we discovered the huge demand for information about snowboard products. Some of the original crew wasn’t really staying actively involved with snowboarding, and so we began forming the review team to disperse the reviews among more writers.

The site went through a bit of a makeover, to better reflect some of the other things we were doing, including a photo gallery, and a weekly photo that cycled on the front page.


The 2002-2003 season showed us that there was more interest in the product reviews than in the resort reviews, and while we continued to review resorts, the priority really shifted towards products. We were receiving more products than ever before, and had seven different reviewers out testing gear.

As SBG grew, we began to feel the constraints of an all .html website. December 2003 saw a major site redesign as we moved to a database-driven back-end. We were running a highly modified version of a news/blog writing software.


In the fall of 2004 the editorial staff relocated to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Steamboat was chosen due to a review of the mountain a couple years previously. Chris’ statement was “Of all the resorts we’ve reviewed, it was the first mountain that I felt I could live at.” The magazine continued to grow, and over the 2004-2005 season we had 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 hits.

The current SBG website was introduced in November of 2005. It’s running on the Censura review system, a huge upgrade from the modified e-xoops software we were running before.