A custom website for The Wavehouse Surf Shop

section from the wavehouse website template

The Wavehouse are a surf shop based in Bude, Cornwall that opened in early 2006. We were asked to provide them with a website that, aswell as being a fully functional online shop, needed to give the admin users at the shop access to upload daily surf reports, news articles, events management, and a photo gallery. To wrap all of this up, they wanted a nice custom template designing to reflect the ethos of the shop.

Our design team quickly produced a collection of ideas in retro-surf style, using a wide selection of influences from 60s/70s photography and design. The selected design features a retro-modern look & feel, incorporating logos from some of the brands available within the shop.

Online Surf Shop

image used for beginner surfboards category

The primary purpose of the website for The Wavehouse was to act as an online shop, offering all of the products available in-store online. We provided our client with a copy of our in-house developed e-commerce facility, and configured it to work with their selected payment service provider (PROTX in this case).

The monkeydevil e-commerce facility provides online product and order management in a secure environment, and sits comfortably alongside any other custom-developed modules. One of the benefits of using our in-house developed solution was that we can also customise the behaviour of the catalogue system to our client's needs. In the case of The Wavehouse, we were asked to display appropriate images for sub-categories of products (e.g. "male" clothes). Wherever possible, we incorporated photographs of friends and staff at The Wavehouse, for that special touch...

Custom Daily Surf Reporting System

image from the surf reports page

One of the custom features that The Wavehouse requested was for a system to allow their staff to add/edit daily surf reports. Rather than provide a simple, rigid solution (such as a drop-down for wave-height and a text area for entering the surfing conditions), we developed a fully customisable surf reporting system, giving the staff full control of a number of surf-reporting factors such as wave-height, wind speed, wind direction, swell direction, ...). This has proved extremely successful and is one of the main traffic-grabbing features of the site.

We continue to produce work for The Wavehouse in the form of graphic designs and regular updates to the website structure and template.