Greg Lutzka

Greg found me through a mutual friend who knew enough about both of us to think the work would land. The brief was simple in the way that briefs from real working pros usually are: he needed an official website that actually represented him — sponsors, films, photography, signature products, everything in one place — without it feeling like a Squarespace template every other skater had also bought.

The constraint underneath the brief was the part that mattered. Greg had been turning pro before the era of Wix and was professionally active well into it. The site couldn't be the kind of thing that aged out in two years and needed to be rebuilt. It had to be a stable home for the long career — something he could send sponsors to, send media to, and not think about.

The fashionable answer in 2019 would have been Webflow, Squarespace, or a Shopify theme dressed up as a portfolio. I argued for something quieter: hand-coded static HTML and CSS with light JavaScript. Built once, hosted simply, edited by hand whenever something needed to change.

The argument was durability. A custom site on a stable stack ages better than a templated site on a platform whose admin will be redesigned three times before the decade is out. The customer-facing experience stays the same. The sponsor logos get swapped, the bio gets updated, the photo essays get added — and the underlying structure doesn't shift under anyone's feet. The cost is that I'm the one who edits the HTML when changes come in. The benefit is that nothing breaks because a third party shipped an update Greg never asked for.

Six years in, that bet has paid out. The site has been live continuously since launch. I've handled every sponsor change, every annual bio refresh, every new film embed, every photo essay drop. Greg has never had to think about it.

Restraint as a positioning move

Skateboarding's design vocabulary defaults loud — graphic-heavy, aggressive, layered, the visual equivalent of a deck graphic on the wall of a shop. That's correct for skate brands. It's wrong for a working pro athlete's personal site, which exists to communicate with sponsors, media, and event organizers as much as with fans.

Greg's site reads quieter than the brand sites of the companies he rides for. That's deliberate. The athlete is the constant; the brands rotate. The page architecture treats Greg as the through-line and lets the sponsor section, the gallery, and the photo essay system swap content in and out without the design having to fight to keep up.

A signature product grid that earns its space

Greg has signature products with multiple brands — skateboards, ramps, clothing, footwear, motorcycle exhaust, motorcycle seats, motorcycle bag systems. The site organizes them as a product grid with brand logos and links out to where each product is actually sold. The grid's job is twofold: it functions as a press kit for the sponsorship side of his career, and it doubles as a fan-facing "if you want what Greg rides, here's the list."

The decision was to keep the grid completely brand-respectful. No re-styled product photography, no parody of sponsor branding, no graphic flourish that would conflict with the partner brands' own identities. Each item shows up the way the sponsor would want it to show up. That makes the site sponsor-friendly to a degree most personal sites aren't, and is part of why it functions well for Greg as a press piece.

A photo essay system, used once at scale

The site has a built-in popup-style photo essay format. Greg used it for "11 Days in Dubai" — a long-form photo essay from a tour — and the slot remains open for whenever the next one ships. The format exists because Greg's career produces moments worth more than an Instagram carousel, and the site is structured to handle them when they happen.

I'd rather have a feature that gets used once well than a content section that demands constant feeding to look alive. The Dubai essay is the example; the system is ready when the next trip is.

The site is hand-coded HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No build pipeline, no framework, no CMS. Updates are made directly to the HTML when Greg sends new content. The simplicity is the feature.

I host the site on my own infrastructure — same approach I take with most of my long-term clients. Greg doesn't manage a hosting account, doesn't keep up with SSL renewal, doesn't get an annual email from a registrar reminding him a payment failed. The whole infrastructure layer is something I handle, which means the site has effectively zero operational overhead from his side. He can text me about a sponsor swap and have it live the same day.

That arrangement is unusual enough to be worth naming. Most freelance designer-client relationships end at the handoff, and most websites built in 2019 by independent designers were either rebuilt by their owners or abandoned by 2023. Lutzka's site has stayed live and current because the maintenance never had to be anyone else's problem.

The site is greglutzka.com. The Bio 2024 PDF is hosted on it. The current sponsor lineup is on it. The "Designed by Eric Bell Designs" credit is in the footer where it has been since launch. It is, six years on, Greg's official web home — the URL printed on his business cards and the link he sends new sponsors to introduce himself.

I'm not going to put traffic numbers in this section because I don't have them in front of me and they'd be the wrong measure of this project anyway. The right measure is that the working relationship is still going, the site is still the brand's center of gravity, and Greg has never once asked me to rebuild it from scratch. For a 2019 build, that's the result.

The Lutzka engagement has expanded beyond the website over the years. I built the original storefront for Lutzka's Garage, Greg's custom motorcycle parts venture, and a Shopify storefront for 85 Industries, a related side project. Both are paused right now while Greg's focus is elsewhere — but both are evidence that the trust built on a single project becomes the basis for whatever the working pro decides to do next. When skateboarding turned into motorcycles turned into custom parts, I was the designer he kept coming back to.

If Greg ever wanted to push the site into a more editorial direction, the photo essay system is already there for it — what's missing is the cadence. A handful of long-form pieces per year, properly produced with photography and pull quotes, would lift the site from "official home" to "documentary record of a long career." The architecture is ready. It's a content commitment question, not a design question.