Lake Playdate

Lake Playdate is Captain Ryan Cash's surf boat charter on Table Rock Lake. Table Rock is a vacation lake. Nearly everybody looking for a boat day is holding a phone, so I built the whole site for a phone first. It takes booking requests on its own, sends guests a pre-trip form before they show up, and doesn't come with a monthly software bill. Under Google's throttled mobile test the homepage scores 100, against a median of 55 for Kansas City small-business sites.

The challenge

Ryan has twenty years on Table Rock and one very nice boat, a 2024 Supreme ZS232. What he didn't have was a website. His marketing was a Facebook page, he'd already given up on one of those AI site builders, and his bank had offered him a booking add-on. He wanted a site that looked as good as the boat, and he wanted requests to keep coming in while he was out on the water. What he didn't want was another subscription.

What I built

Four pages and a booking page, all designed at phone width first. A bar stays pinned to the bottom of the screen with two buttons, check a date and call, so the next step is always under your thumb. The Day page walks through a charter in order, from the boat on its trailer to the end of the afternoon, in 18 of his photographs. Each photo gets cut into a ladder of AVIF sizes, so a phone on one bar of lake signal pulls the smallest version that still looks sharp. The outline of Table Rock that runs through the site comes from the U.S. Geological Survey's map data, and it draws itself in as you scroll.

The booking side took the most thought. When someone asks about a date, the request is saved first and only then emailed to Ryan, so a bad day for email can't lose anybody's request. The form works with JavaScript turned off, it keeps a record of exactly what the person agreed to, and it never asks for a card. Ryan answers each one himself and sends a payment link once the day is set. Guests get the pre-trip form ahead of time, so the paperwork is done before anybody gets wet.

The results

Under Google's throttled mobile test on 2026-10-11, the homepage scored a perfect 100 for performance, accessibility, SEO and best practices, with a 1.5-second Largest Contentful Paint, against a median mobile performance of 55 across the 105 Kansas City small-business sites I surveyed. None of it runs on rented software. No booking app or form service bills him by the month. The booking system is his, and the hosting, database and request emails all fit inside Cloudflare's free tier. More than thirty automated checks run against the build, from accessibility to image weight to the booking flow itself.

Measured under Google's throttled mobile (Lighthouse) test on 2026-10-11. *Medians from my survey of 105 KC small-business websites. No CrUX real-user field data is available for this site, so every figure here is a lab measurement.

The stack, for the curious

No framework. The pages are rendered from a small database by plain JavaScript I wrote and served as static files from Cloudflare's network. A Cloudflare Worker handles only three things: the booking request, the pre-trip form and the owner tools. Requests and form records live in Cloudflare D1, and the alert email goes out through Cloudflare Email Routing, so there's no third-party mail service and no API key for one. Every image ships as AVIF with its exact width and height, and everything below the first one waits until you scroll near it. A strict content security policy covers every page. Analytics are cookieless, through LiveDash.

Visit lakeplaydate.com ↗