The client
James Dumergue is an MCA Yachtmaster Offshore captain with decades of experience commanding luxury motor yachts, and he also films and photographs them. Boat Promote Marine Media sells that combination to yacht brokerages and private owners from Australia's Gold Coast.
His clients aren't really buying photography. They are buying someone who already understands vessel geometry and how light behaves on water. The brand line says it plainly: stop explaining your boat to photographers.
The problem
A brand like that can't sit on a template. The site had to carry a lot:
- Five services, each needing to sell on its own
- Nine portfolio projects with almost nothing in common
- A pricing ladder from $399 to $1,199, with four tiers and add-ons
- A navy and gold brand that stock plugin styling kept fighting
Every portfolio plugin on the market forced its own generic category names and its own look. And the client had to be able to run all of it without a developer.
What we built
I built the site on WordPress as part of my AI WordPress website development service, with one piece of bespoke code where nothing off the shelf would do.
- A custom design system. Navy, gold and the captain's seal, built from scratch rather than bought, so nothing on it looks like anyone else's site.
- A page per service. Drone work, photography, presenting, the AI tech centre and web development each get their own page and their own keyword.
- A portfolio plugin written for this site alone. Its own post type, taxonomy and templates, with no third-party licence to renew.
- Filters in the client's own words. Eight categories named by James, from Bluewater Battlewagons to Powered by the Wind, filtering instantly with no page reload.
- Packages compared on one screen. Four tiers plus add-ons, side by side.
- Everything editable from the dashboard. Standard, licensed WordPress tooling everywhere else, so the site stays supportable long after handover.
The result
The portfolio now talks the way marine people talk. The filters read Bluewater Battlewagons and Powered by the Wind, not Photography and Video, and one tap narrows nine projects to the three that matter.
Each of the five service pages can rank on its own. A visitor who arrives for a $399 package can see the path up to the $1,199 Pro Bundle on the same screen.
For more boating and yachting work, see my marine and yachting website projects.
Stack
- WordPress
- Custom portfolio plugin
