WordPress for marinas & charters
Charter booking has rules no off-the-shelf plugin models: tide and season windows, deposits, headcount pricing, weather cancellations. We build WordPress sites for Tampa Bay marinas and charters and write the custom plugins that handle those rules properly.
A charter site isn't a brochure — it's a booking desk that has to work at 6am for the angler planning a trip and at 9pm for the family booking vacation. Four things we get right for businesses on the water.
Whether you run FareHarbor, Peek, or a whiteboard by the fuel dock, we wire booking and availability into the site so guests see real open slots — half-day, full-day, sunset run — and book without calling. Deposits collected, calendars synced, double-bookings sunk.
Small craft advisories don't care about your schedule. We build clear weather-policy pages and easy rebooking paths, plus a site banner you can update from your phone at the dock — so a blown-out morning means reschedules, not refunds and one-star reviews.
Tourist season hits like a king tide — snowbirds, spring breakers, tarpon season — then goes slack. We build lean pages on hosting that shrugs off the surge, and structure the site so locals-focused offseason offers are easy to swap in.
Nothing sells a charter like yesterday's cobia photo, and nothing kills a booking like a gallery that won't load on dock Wi-Fi. We compress, resize, and lazy-load every image so a hundred fish pictures still open in a blink on a phone with two bars.
Almost certainly. FareHarbor, Peek, Xola, Dockwa for transient slips, or a plain reservation form that emails your first mate — we integrate what you have rather than forcing a switch. If what you have is a paper calendar, we'll talk honestly about the simplest system worth adopting.
Fair question — the flag is decoration, the knowledge isn't. We're a Tampa Bay crew; we know the difference between inshore and offshore trips, why your rates page needs half-day and full-day splits, what a fighting chair photo does for bookings, and why June and January need different homepages.
That's the primary design target, not an afterthought. We build mobile-first, test on real devices over weak connections, and keep the tap-to-book and tap-to-call paths above the fold — because the person booking from the dock or the hotel pool won't pinch and zoom to give you money.
Yes — that's why we quote fixed prices, agreed before any work starts. Ongoing care is optional and month to month, so you're not locked into a retainer through the slow season. And the site, domain, and accounts are yours either way.
Either way works: we set the site up so you can change rates, crew, and photos yourself, or we handle updates on a monthly care plan. New boat in the fleet, captain change, red tide notice — updated same business day, not next sprint.
This is the clearest case for custom plugin work we see: generic booking plugins simply don't understand boats.
Vessel, captain, headcount pricing, season and tide windows — availability that reflects what you can actually run.
Deposit at booking, balance before departure, and a cancellation policy the site enforces instead of your office arguing it.
One-click reschedule for a blown-out day, with customers notified and slots released automatically.
Availability, waitlists, and renewals handled in a custom plugin rather than a shared spreadsheet.
Tell us how trips are booked and cancelled today, and what your deposit and weather policies are. We'll scope the WordPress build and booking plugin at a fixed price.
No ransom required. First consultation is free.
Tampa Forge