Step Aside Stables
A purpose-built classical dressage and Tennessee Walking Horse training site with 66 individual horse profiles, full show history, and award records spanning eight years.
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The Challenge
Step Aside Stables had a website — it just hadn't been touched since 2018. Built on outdated hosting infrastructure with web design techniques from an earlier era, it broke on mobile, loaded slowly, and presented the stable's decades of history through an interface that felt abandoned rather than active. Prospective students searching for riding lessons or training programs in the Los Angeles area were finding a site that didn't reflect the quality of the program behind it. Meanwhile, the depth of the stable's actual content — 66 horses across five categories, award records spanning 2012 through 2019, costume show galleries, and community events — had no home online. All of that horse data still lived in a master Excel spreadsheet. Rebuilding the site meant more than a visual refresh: it required a complete architectural overhaul, a mobile-first design, modern hosting, and a content system purpose-built to handle the volume and complexity of what the stable had actually accumulated.
Our Solution
We built a fully custom Next.js site from scratch with a classical equestrian identity — warm parchment backgrounds, gold accents, and editorial typography set in Cinzel and Cormorant Garamond to match the tradition and elegance of the discipline. Every page is statically generated at build time and served from a CDN. The entire horse database — 66 biographies across five categories (geldings and stallions, mares, previous horses, retirees, and in memoriam) — was migrated from the client's master Excel spreadsheet into structured markdown files, then rendered into individual profile pages with photos, color, registration details, and lineage notes. Show results and award records spanning 2012 through 2019 are organized by year across dedicated event sections. A lightbox gallery system handles the costume show archives. The contact form routes through Formspree, and JSON-LD structured data is built in throughout for local SEO targeting Glendale and the greater Los Angeles equestrian community.
Results
The new site launched at stepasidestables.com with 66 horse profile pages, 6 event gallery sections, and 989 image assets — all statically served for instant load times on any device. For the first time, Step Aside Stables has a professional digital home that matches the depth of their program. Prospective students can browse the full horse roster before their first visit, explore years of show results and high-point award records, and contact the trainer directly through the site. The structured markdown content system makes ongoing updates fast without touching the codebase.
Technologies Used
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