Happy 7th Birthday ScooterLab | NEWS

How time flies! Today marks ScooterLab’s 7th Birthday. Way back in March 2016 we launched ourselves out into the world wide web.

Having come from a background in traditional print magazines, myself and Sticky jacked in our freelance careers and gave away our sanity to launch this FREE internet magazine.

FREE doesn’t pay the bills very well though so we had to monetise things in some way, not always easy on the internet without annoying pop ups and other click bait gimmicks to turn readers off.

SLUK Shop

From humble beginnings and with lots of hard work, time effort and money we not only succeeded in what we planned to do but exceeded our plans in many ways. For instance, our online shop. We set out to sell a few SLUK t-shirts to help support the website but have ended up with an ever-increasing range of merchandise. One of the biggest turning points was when we started designing and making SLUK Plastics™ we now make and sell over 70 plastic products with the help of our flexible friend, Nigel. You’ll see our products at any classic scooter event in the world and believe me when I say I feel humble every time I spot a SLUK screen or other product being used or worn by fellow scooterists. Thanks to everybody who buys our stuff.

We also supply and sell many leading brands, products that we know work and are useful to people like you and us. Remember to have a look in the SLUK Shop before you make a purchase elsewhere. It helps to support ScooterLab.

Thanks to our advertisers

One thing we couldn’t have survived without is the support of our loyal advertisers, three of them have been with us from day one and we’re eternally grateful to Lexham Insurance, Scooter Center and SIP for not only believing in the power of the internet but continuing to support us, even during those very difficult Covid times.

At the moment we also have Casa Performance, Retrospective Scooters, Italjet, and Sinnis helping us to keep running SLUK for FREE. Be sure to give these people your business and if you get the chance, let them know SLUK sent you.

Advertise with us?

We try not to overcrowd the website with loads of adverts but we do have space for a couple more quality businesses. If you’d like to be seen by the largest scootering readership in the world speak to us. You can email: advertising@scooterlab.uk 

Highs and lows

ScooterLab has had its fair share of ups and downs, like most businesses. Having outgrown our original website, we decided (at great expense) to have a replacement built during 2020… mid-Covid. We thought the new developer was up to the job but it turned out to be a massive and very expensive mistake. That difficult second website looked ok but the functionality was abysmal. Working on it was like watching paint dry, every feature took forever to layout and it never did what it should have done. Aside from that, it came with its own internet version of Covid. Those bugs killed lots of our early features, infecting them with random code and causing all manner of heartache, stress and pain. Those articles still suffer from Long Covid…

Last summer we decided enough was enough and a Scottish web developer came to the rescue and built us this shiny new ‘SLUK version 3.0’ website. It looks great and is a joy to work on. So things are certainly looking up. The only downside is that we had to place all the old articles in the SLUK Archives where they can still be accessed (direct from the ‘Archives’ tab at the top of the page, or by searching on Google) but they don’t always look as they originally did. We are planning to move them over to this site though one by one (a time consuming process that has to be done manually and includes some additional decoding work). Hopefully one day you’ll be able to enjoy all of those earlier features under one roof and they’ll be looking as good as they originally did. In the meantime, we apologise for our sad-looking archives.

Birthday celebrations

As we sit around the computer waiting for our Birthday celebrations to begin we’re feeling enthusiastic about the year ahead.

Things are looking much better for 2023. Everything is starting to get back to some kind of ‘normal’ after the triple whammy of Covid and the impact and knock-on effect of the war in Ukraine and the added impact caused by the cost of living crisis.

Our scooters are primed and ready for action and Easter is only a few short weeks away. I’ll look forward to seeing you out and about this season, whether that’s on the road, at a race track, standing around the bar or mooching around at an event somewhere.

Thanks for your support SLUKERS.

Iggy